Sixsmith. I climb the steps of the Scot monument every morning and all becomes clear. Wish I could make you see this brightness. Don’t worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well. I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may… Continue reading Ben Whishaw
A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to… Continue reading Ben Whishaw
Sometimes, I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow; there’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. It is as if I never thought anything, never wrote anything, never felt anything. All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence. — Gwyneth Paltrow [Sylvia Plath] Sylvia (2003) Written by John Brownlow. Directed by… Continue reading Gwyneth Paltrow
Yes, I’m drunk. And you’re beautiful. And tomorrow morning, I’ll be sober but you’ll still be beautiful. — Michael Pitt [Matthew] The Dreamers (2003) Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Screenplay by Gilbert Adair.
Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history. — Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau. (Rowohlt Tb. June 1, 2001) Originally published 1998.
Love is like the wild rose-briar,Friendship like the holly-tree—The holly is dark when the rose-briar bloomsBut which will bloom most constantly? — Emily Brontë, from “Love and Friendship,” The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (Columbia University Press, 1941)
Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where… Continue reading Matthew Arnold
When I was sixteen, I won a great victory. I felt in that moment I would live to be a hundred. Now I know I shall not see thirty. None of us know our end, really, or what hand will guide us there. A king may move a man, a father may claim a son,… Continue reading Edward Norton
The Vale of Soul-Making 