Brian Holmes
The question is how you rearrange the stars above your head, to open up unexpected paths on the ground beneath your feet. — Brian Holmes, “Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies,” Continental Drift 2009/02/27
Category: Article
Paul Celan
You were, when I met you, both things for me: the sensuous and the spiritual. That can never come asunder… — Paul Celan in a letter to Ingeborg Bachmann, quoted in ‘The Correspondence of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan’ by Charlie Louth from ‘Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation’
S.L. Cato
Mental labels don’t define who I am, time and aging only gets me closer to those I love, will love, and have loved. — S.L. Cato, from “Hello May, Birthday month, musing on aging gracefully,” https://itsnotcrazytoday.com/2016/05/01/its-my-birthday-month-musing-on-aging-gracefully/ May 1, 2016
Nina MacLaughlin
For those who prefer the lengthened twilights of summer, the afternoon dark carries with it a sense of gloom, a lethargy, a melancholy, a despair. — Nina MacLaughlin, from “The Dark Feels Different in November” , The Paris Review Nov 8, 2017
Janice D. Soderling
Evenings I sit in the hostel kitchen, writing, with a pot of strong tea and a candle for comfort. The immense quiet is broken only by those snaps and creaks that inhabit old houses. I am partial to old things: old peeling doors, rusty gates, overgrown paths. Old things know how to relinquish the past;… Continue reading Janice D. Soderling
Primo Levi
And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own… Continue reading Primo Levi
Karl Jaspers
To philosophize is to learn to die – philosophizing is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as Being. — Karl Jaspers, “Philosophy and Science,” World Review Magazine (March 1950).
Craig Childs
Alone is a state of being. Not loneliness, but aloneness. It is something sought rather than avoided. — Craig Childs, from “On Being Alone,” Emergence Magazine (no. 2, Wildness)
Kapka Kassabova
You will ache for slow beauty to save you from your quick, quick life. — Kapka Kassabova, from “The Door,” Clare Morgan’s What Poetry Brings to Business (University of Michigan Press, 2010)
Melissa Broder
Romantic obsession is my first language. I live in a world of fantasies, infatuations and love poems. Sometimes I wonder if the yearning I’ve felt for others was more of a yearning for yearning itself. I’ve pined insatiably and repeatedly: for strangers, new lovers, unrequited flames. While the subjects changed, that feeling always remained. Perhaps,… Continue reading Melissa Broder
The Vale of Soul-Making 