A Walk in the Country To walk anywhere in the world, to live now, to speak, to breathe a harmless breath: what snowflake, even, may try today so calm a life, so mild a death? Out in the country once, walking the hollow night, I felt a burden of silver come: my back had caught… Continue reading William Stafford
You cannot become attached to human beings, things, or landscapes without suffering immediately taking up a position at your side. This is probably a trite remark. Yet a much stranger fate brings you face to face with uprootedness. It is better, then, to accept the suffering at your side. And illuminate it with love. —… Continue reading Pierre-Albert Jourdan
Asleep! O sleep a little while, white pearl! And let me kneel, and let me pray to thee, And let me call Heaven’s blessing on thine eyes, And let me breathe into the happy air, That doth enfold and touch thee all about, Vows of my slavery, my giving up, My sudden adoration, my great… Continue reading John Keats
Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit. — Neil Gaiman,… Continue reading Neil Gaiman
Because you can’t be this afraid of losing everything if you don’t love everything first because you have to have a soul-crushing hope that things will get better to be this afraid of missing it. — Catalina Ferry, from “Anxiety Group.” NYC Urbana Poetry Slam. The Bowery Poetry Club, 5/12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVEf6jS8GdU
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. — Haruki Murakami, 1Q84. (Shinchosha October 25, 2011)
In her sweetness where she folds my wounds there is a flower that bees cannot afford. It is too rich for them and would change their wings into operas and all their honey into the lonesome maps of a nonexistent California county. When she has finished folding all my wounds she puts them away in… Continue reading Richard Brautigan
Some days, I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks, all the minutes, all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without you. And I can’t breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart. I get so weak.… Continue reading Khaled Hosseini
there’s always a little joy, and even beauty lies close at hand, beneath the bark of every hour, in the quiet heart of concentration, and another person hides in each of us — universal, strong, invincible. — Adam Zagajewski, from “Three Angels,” Pangolin House, Spring 2014. Translated by Clare Cavanagh
If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “Head and Shoulders,” The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Modern Library; Modern Library Pbk. Ed edition, November 8, 2005) Originally published 1924.
The Vale of Soul-Making 