For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The First Elegy,” The Duino Elegies. (Insel-Verlag 1923)
…beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments. — Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose. (Marc Barbezat – L’Arbalete (Original French) 1946, Grove Press (English Translation) 1994)
Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions It’s good to be neuter. I want to have meaningless legs. There are things unbearable. One can evade them a long time. Then you die. The ocean reminds me of your green room. There are things unbearable. Scorn, princes, this little size of dying. My personal… Continue reading Anne Carson
Until you’ve got your mouth full of cocaine, you don’t know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tire. You’re on fourth speed all the time, and the… Continue reading Aleister Crowley
34 The poem moves north. “Good-bye.” “Good-bye.” North In dark dawn to Vermont, snowflakes drifting Among the pines, a pickup, a Ford ¾-ton, F-250, 4-wheel-drive, rusty green with one door Crimped shut forever and a busted gear Banging in the front axle. “Good-bye.” (O God, clinging.) North means the way – Bearing this image, the… Continue reading Hayden Carruth
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd. — Thomas Mann
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times. Come, yet again, come, come. — Rumi, Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations. Edited by Sy Safransky. (North Atlantic Books January 11, 1993) Originally published… Continue reading Rumi
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Solitude. (Ticknor and Fields: Boston August 9, 1854)
Making love with you is like drinking sea water. The more I drink the thirstier I become, until nothing can slake my thirst but to drink the entire sea. — Kenneth Rexroth, The Love Poems of Marichiko (Christopher’s Books January 1, 1978)
She had a passionate longing for the garden, the darkness, the pure sky, the stars. — Anton Chekhov, “After the Theatre,” The Essential Tales of Chekhov. (Harper Perennial; Reprint edition June 20, 2000)
The Vale of Soul-Making 