You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.… Continue reading Ernest Hemingway
in time of all sweet things beyond whatever mind may comprehend, remember seek (forgetting find) and in a mystery to be (when time from time shall set us free) forgetting me, remember me. — E.E. Cummings, “in time of daffodils,” E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962, Revised, Corrected, and Expanded Edition (Liveright, 1994) a
I used to love September, but now it just rhymes with remember. ― Dominic Riccitello
Late August Late August — This is the plum season, the nights blue and distended, the moon hazed, this is the season of peaches with their lush lobed bulbs that glow in the dusk, apples that drop and rot sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands No more the shrill voices that cried Need Need… Continue reading Margaret Atwood
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available. ― Theodor W. Adorno
Thinking of you this evening, I think of mystery; I think of umbrellas of crystal Shading a cinnamon sea; I think of swallow-tailed shadows Enveloping history; And the past becomes the future, And the present is yet to be; And life is a rain-swept mirror Through which perpetually A girl with bright hair flowing, Dappled… Continue reading William Jay Smith
Please — consider me a dream. — Franz Kafka
I know that darkness. Have stood on that bridge in the space between the streetlights dizzy with looking down. Maybe some darks are deep enough to swallow what we want them to. But you can’t have two worlds in your hands and choose emptiness. — Mary Szybist, from “So-and-So Descending from the Bridge,” Incarnadine. (Graywolf… Continue reading Mary Szybist
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us. — Marcel Proust
ALL that I serve will die, all my delights, the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field, the silent lilies standing in the woods, the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle in its own age. Let the world bring on me the sleep of darkness without… Continue reading Wendell Berry,
The Vale of Soul-Making 