A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony. A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders. You look away: the new love! You look back,—the new love! “Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time,” the children sing… Continue reading Arthur Rimbaud
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. — C.S. Lewis
We have slept together inA lonely bed. Now my heartTurns towards you, awake at last,Penitent, lost in the lastLoneliness. Speak to me. TalkTo me. Break the black silence.Speak of a tree full of leaves,Of a flying bird, the newMoon in the sunset, a poem,A book, a person – all theCasual hfrankealing speechOf your resonant, quiet… Continue reading Kenneth Rexroth
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves,… Continue reading Gustave Flaubert
There are spirits that come back to uswhen we have grown into another agewe recognize them just as they leave uswe remember them when we cannot hear themsome of them come from the bodies of birdssome arrive unnoticed like forgettingthey do not recall earlier livesand there are distant voices still hoping to find us —… Continue reading W.S. Merwin
It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace. ― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary. (Anchor September 14, 2004)
Sonnet LXXXI And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.The night turns on its invisible wheels,and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber. No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,we will go together, over the waters of… Continue reading Pablo Neruda
We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. — Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. (Blackwood’s Magazine 1899 serial; 1902 book) Originally published 1899.
Maybe the silence you move throughshaped me, the way a church bell ringing resonateslong after the ear ceases to perceive it, the way waves space themselvesuntil they stop. — Nick Flynn, from “Man Dancing with a Paper Cup,” Some Ether: Poems. (Graywolf Press June 2, 2015)
The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. ― Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition. (1846)
The Vale of Soul-Making 