four

oddness

literacki

"Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again…"

— Frank O’Hara, from “Mayakovsky”

ars poetica

"Fill yourself up with the forsythias
and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too
with your blood and happiness and wretchedness,
the dark ground that seems to come with you.

Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome.
And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows,
then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you
into June, when the roses blow."

— Gottfried Benn, “Last Spring,”

literacki

"I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one. The other with whom I am in love designates for me the specialty of my desire."

— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

literacki

"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

ars poetica

"I have in mind
only how even a least
disturbance, strangely
heightening a thing’s
beauty, can at last
define it."

— Carl Phillips, “Words of Love”

quoth the madman

"… when one is in love one has no love left for anyone…"

— Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

ars poetica

"Things have a way of disappearing that pleases the gods. You’d be mad to try and stay."

— Jeff Whitney, from “Everyone in Goya’s Black Paintings…”

ars poetica

"All but Death, can be Adjusted—
Dynasties repaired—
Systems—settled in their Sockets—
Citadels—dissolved—

Wastes of Lives—resown with Colors
By Succeeding Springs—
Death—unto itself—Exception—
Is exempt from Change—"

— Emily Dickinson, “[All but Death, can be Adjusted]”

 

ars poetica

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

~Days By Philip Larkin

quoth the madman

“What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”

— Italo Calvino

belles lettres

"He saw himself drowned in a lake, heavy and ice-cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast, and when I drew his attention to those drops of water which were actually falling at regular intervals upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by imitative harmony…. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, translated by sublime equivalents into his musical thought, and not by a servile repetition of external sounds."

— George Sand, describing an encounter with Frédéric Chopin

quoth the madman

"Touch perceives itself but transcends the gaze."

— Luce Irigaray

quoth the madman

"1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also."

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Readers May Be Divided into Four Classes”

literacki

"… the inward self is the only self which really exists."

— Robert Walser, The Walk

literacki

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.
~Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

quote me

Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté

literacki

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear

literacki

Freedom is not knowledge, but what one has become after knowledge. It is a state of mind that not only admits contradiction but seeks it out…

Octavio Paz; “Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare,”

literacki

I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.

H.P. Lovecraft; “Ex Oblivione”

quoth the madman

"But there is another meaning of the word ‘humanism.’ It is basically this: man is always outside of himself, and it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that man is realized."

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

literacki

"Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it."

— Mary Oliver, from “October”

quoth the madman

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.

~Jane Austen

literacki

"Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Book of Hours



literacki

"To be so held by brittleness, shapeliness,
by meaning. As where I have to go where you go,
I have to touch what you must touch,
in hunger, in boredom, the spindrift, the ticket…
Distilled in you (can you hear me)
the idiom in you, the why—"

— Jorie Graham, from “Soul Says” (full poem here)

literacki

"… we are only fiction. We are only the idea we have of ourselves."

— Edmond Jabès, from Cut of Time

literacki

"If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance."

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

quoth the madman

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."

— Lao Tzu

literacki

"To say this silence means to say the sacred, but also, at the same time, to undo it."

— Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion

literacki

I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

~Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

quoth the madman

Remember to look up at the stars, and not down to your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.

~Stephen Hawking

quoth the madman

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

Clarice Lispector

 

literacki

And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

W.B. Yeats

quoth the madman

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

Theodor Adorno

quoth the madman

I really don’t know what ‘I love you’ means. I think it means ‘Don’t leave me here alone.’

Neil Gaiman

literacki

"Swooning saints have a moving charm. They prove that we cannot have revelations in a vertical position, that we cannot stand on our feet to face the ultimate truth. Swooning provokes such wild voluptuousness that a man cognizant of negative joys has a hard time deciding whether to fall or not."

— E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

quoth the madman

No amount of physical beauty will ever be as valuable as a beautiful heart.

Saad Tasleem