Roland Barthe
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. — Roland Barthe, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Hill and Wang, 1978)
Month: April 2020
Jan Zwicky
D is the tailor who sewed the note I shall always love you into the hem of the village belle’s wedding dress, a note not discovered until ten years later in New York where, poor and abandoned, she was ripping up the skirt for curtains, and he came, and he married her. — Jan Zwicky,… Continue reading Jan Zwicky
Rainer Maria Rilke
… seek [that] which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty–describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, the objects of your memory. — Rainer Maria… Continue reading Rainer Maria Rilke
James Richardson
Late Aubade after Hardy So what do you think, Life, it seemed pretty good to me, though quiet, I guess, and unspectacular. It’s been so long, I don’t know any more how these things go. I don’t know what it means that we’ve had this time together. I get that the coffee, the sunlight on… Continue reading James Richardson
Vladimir Nabokov
Consciousness is a message scribbled in the dark. — Vladimir Nabokov, from Pale Fire, “Canto Two.” (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962, corrected edition first published by Vintage International, 1989)
Anne Sexton
December 11th Then I think of you in bed, your tongue half chocolate, half ocean, —Anne Sexton, from “Eighteen Days Without You,” Love Poems. (Mariner Books; 1st Mariner Books Ed edition October 1, 1999)
Hermann Hesse
Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. ― Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East. ( Samuel Fischer 1932, Published in English 1956)
Margaret Atwood
Here is a handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouth- ful of dirt, this poetry. — Margaret Atwood, from “Mushrooms,” Selected Poems II: 1976 – 1986. (Mariner Books; 2nd ed. edition November 5, 1987)
Paul Kleen
One eye sees, the other feels. — Paul Kleen
Stanley Kunitz
the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn. ― Stanley Kunitz, from “The Testing Tree,” fourth strophe, The Testing Tree: Poems. (Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition 1971)
The Vale of Soul-Making 