There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that’s a perfect zero you can go into. There’s a rest point between the heart muscle’s close and open – an instant of keenest living when you’re momentarily dead. You can rest there. – Mary Karr, Lit:… Continue reading Mary Karr
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926. (W. W. Norton & Company February 17, 1969)
And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri. ― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard .… Continue reading Peter Matthiessen
What was it about the ache that I enjoy, that etched groove of remembering an old love, that vein of nostalgia? — Leslie Jamison, from “Museum of Broken Hearts,” Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays (Little, Brown and Company, 2019)
If you must suffer, suffer nobly. Love, laugh through your tears, or cry, create and perhaps, perish. —Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice. (Da Capo Press; Reprint edition February 5, 2008)
My, how foolish I am! You know what I’ve always thought? I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a… Continue reading Truman Capote
I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic. ― Augusten Burroughs, Dry. (St. Martin’s Press June 2003)
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all…I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world,… Continue reading Eugène Ionesco
Insomnia […] is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing. — Marina Benjamin, Insomnia. (Catapult, November 13, 2018)
I loved you, so I drew these tides of / Men into my hands / And wrote my will across the / Sky in stars ― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. (Private edition 1922)
