Last Night As I Was Sleeping Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me, water of a new life that I have never drunk? Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous… Continue reading Antonio Machado
The distance doesn’t matter; it is only the first step that is difficult. ― Mari de Vichy-Chamrond Marquise du Deffand
The words, like bees in a sweet ink, cluster and drone, Indifferent, indelible, A hum and a hum: Back stairsteps to God, ropes to the glass eye: Vineyard, informer, the chair, the throne. Mojo and numberless, breaths From the wet mountains and green mouths; rustlings, Sure sleights of hand, The news that arrives from nowhere:… Continue reading Charles Wright
She awakens first at the touch of love; before that time she is a dream, yet in her dream life we can distinguish two stages: in the first, love dreams about her; in the second, she dreams about love. — Søren Kierkegaard, The Seducer’s Diary. (Princeton University Press, August 18, 1997) Originally published 1843.
This blank paper is the one good thing. I want to fill it with colour, soundlessness like a heart that shuts with slow murmurings. I feel myself slipping into that whiteness. My dumb legs, my red hair pale by moonlight as I doze into a laudanum pod, secretly happy, blooming in the night though the… Continue reading Leanne O’Sulivan
I think she always nursed a small mad hope. — Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire. (Penguin Books, May 1, 2010) Originally published 1962.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the last sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the… Continue reading Wendell Berry
The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world. ― Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook. (Vintage Books May 1, 2001) Originally published 2000.
This morning there’s snow everywhere. We remark on it. You tell me you didn’t sleep well. I say I didn’t either. You had a terrible night. “Me too.” We’re extraordinarily calm and tender with each other as if sensing the other’s rickety state of mind. As if we knew what the other was feeling. We… Continue reading Raymond Carver
There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us. — Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka: A Biography (1937) by Max Brod, as translated by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (1947; 1960)
The Vale of Soul-Making 