Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness… Continue reading Aldous Huxley
Variations on a Summer Day I Say of the gulls that they are flying In light blue air over dark blue sea. II A music more than a breath, but less Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech, A repetition of unconscious things, Letters of rock and water, words Of the visible elements and of ours.… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
There are some memories one does not share. — Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit And Three Other Plays (Vintage, 1955)
We should have known. Should have known to leave well enough alone; we knew, and we didn’t. You said let’s put our cards on the table, your card was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’t get till 4 am, so tired from wanting what we shouldn’t that when we finally found our… Continue reading Jan Heller Levi
Where you counsel me on lips and throat. Where / you love the hiss of my atom. Where the ocean is zero / miles from everywhere. Here, madness has no map. / Here, God is abridged. O to be loved this way. / To have lips that bear fruit. To be cancelled. — Victoria Chang,… Continue reading Victoria Chang
The afternoon Dissolves in my mouth, The landscape dwindles and whispers like rice through my dry fingers. Now twilight. Now the bereft bodies Of those who have never risen from the dead glide down Through the dwarf orchard And waver like candle flames under the peach trees and go out. — Charles Wright, from… Continue reading Charles Wright
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom. ― Gustave Flaubert, November. (Hesperus Press; Translation edition, February 1, 2005) Originally 1842.
Sunset is always disturbing whether theatrical or muted, but still more disturbing is that last desperate glow that turns the plain to rust when on the horizon nothing is left of the pomp and clamor of the setting sun. How hard holding on to that light, so tautly drawn and different, that hallucination which the… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe. — James Dickey
On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths, And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat: Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet. I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak, I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will… Continue reading Arthur Rimbaud
The Vale of Soul-Making 