Days like this give sight a rest and allow other senses to function more freely. Earth and sky were drained of all color. It was either raining or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense that only certain […] dialects can either express verbally or not… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
Dolly said that when she was a girl she’d liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he’d died, she sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine said; and Dolly told her: But the… Continue reading Truman Capote
I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin. — J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. (Back Bay Books January 30, 2001) Originally published January 1st 1955.
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment. — John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (Covici Friede, 1937)
But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free. — Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings. Edited by Bernard… Continue reading Mark Twain
There are people with great gifts who want to create, but are not self-centered enough. The glory of creation is in them. They end by creating themselves; and they are miraculous creatures. People fall in love with them, because they’ve made something new. – Christina Stead, The Puzzleheaded Girl (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967)
Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. — César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind. (New Directions June 30, 2011) Originally… Continue reading César Aira
…no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If… Continue reading D.H. Lawrence
Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. — César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind. (New Directions June 30, 2011) Originally… Continue reading César Aira
I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one’s wife’s lover in one’s socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible. ― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata. (Modern Library; Modern Library Paperback Ed edition September 9, 2003) Originally published 1889.
The Vale of Soul-Making 