I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. — Annie Dillard, from “Living Like Weasels,” Teaching a Stone to Talk (HarperCollins, New York, 2009, Kindle Edition)
The geography of your destiny is always clearer to the eye of your soul than to the intentions and needs of your surface mind. — John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong (Harper Perennial; Reprint edition, March 22, 2000)
The transience of humanity frames the tragedy of all people. There are no happy conclusions to life, we all die, and until we die, we will experience both happiness and pain. Acceptance of the tragedy of humankind without remorse is a shattering experience; it enables us to relinquish mawkish misconceptions, destructive obsessions, and crippling attachments.… Continue reading Kilroy J. Oldster
And the loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality. I have said before that in this vast melody of life, some learn more, some less; therefore, in this big orchestra, everyone has his own role. The one who can perceive the entire melody is at the same time the loneliest and the closest to… Continue reading Rainer Maria Rilke
The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar’s art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. ― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper Perennial, November 12, 2013)
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon; First Edition, October 3, 2006)
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other. ― Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs ( University of Michigan Press, February 15th 1995) Originally published 1995.
The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life. ― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (Penguin Books, December 2, 1986)
The Vale of Soul-Making 