This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.Night, sleep, and the stars. ― Walt Whitman, “A Clear Midnight,” in the section “From Noon to Starry Night” in the seventh… Continue reading Walt Whitman
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack. — William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Harrison Smith, 1930)
Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour, as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. —… Continue reading Marcel Proust
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird’s life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird’s heart? ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young… Continue reading James Joyce
Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid pleasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor. — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics,… Continue reading James Joyce
Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid pleasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor. — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics,… Continue reading James Joyce
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. — Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass. Originally published: July 4, 1855.
No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he’s hungry and sleep when he’s sleepy. — Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveller, (Mayflower 1968)
The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I’ve swallowed three hooks and am… Continue reading Samuel Beckett
Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit! (Oh, how large the world is in the brightness of the lamps. How small the world is in the eyes of recollection!) — Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One (Grasset,1913)
The Vale of Soul-Making 