ponder

"When inspiration fails, fill in by making a fair copy of what you have done already.
Intuition will awake as a result."

- Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’

pondering

"love does not idealize the other. The miracle is that you say: ‘Okay you are this person who is slightly stupid, not a perfect body, or whatever - but still you are absolute for me’."

- Slavoj Žižek

ponder

"The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all."

- Soren Kierkegaard

ponder

“It’s funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.”

— Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

ponder

“It’s one of the singular features of our little social-technological moment that people all over the world whom we otherwise would never even be aware of can effortlessly impinge upon our minds and lives and desktops. We probably see fewer people in person these days, but our lives are populated by an entire chorus of disembodied presences, amplified and directed by the Internet, as if we had all begun to suffer from a mild form of schizophrenia.”

— Lev Grossman, 2006

ponder

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

W.B. Yeats, from The Countess Cathleen

ars poetica

“At day’s end one page from the ancient book of sunsets blazes and smokes on a fire that has burned forever, yet is not warm enough to keep us young.”
Ted Kooser, from “April,” The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book

ponder

 

How prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies; how slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls!

!Henry David Thoreau, Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau

ars poetica

There’s little to do these days but sit in a lawn chair and measure how your shadow eats itself slowly and spits it back out. Everywhere the morning tearing up into daybreak through bald roots, the scribble of cross wires beneath the fertile arras. For every inch of dirt here, there is a country accounted for over those green-ruffled peaks, unconjugated and tenseless.
Andrew Zawacki, from section iv “Diacritics” of “Mise en Scène,” Reasons of Breakings: Poems

literacki

“Meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts–names trimmed with colored ribbons.”

 Lyn Hejinian, from “Meaning reasons sentenced haply,” My Life in the Nineties

literacki

“Always
The dove’s moan in the mimosa tree,”

Charles Wright, from “A Journal of Southern Rivers,” Xionia

pondering

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable.
—Tennessee Williams, from “The Catastrophe of Success,” The Glass Menagerie

pondering

There is a place everyone leaves for.
Someone you slept with once said that to you
while he ran his hands over your face.
And there is a place for those still here,
Alex Dimitrov, from “Evening,” Memorious

ponder

“Let’s create a new memory, where our futures will fall back for strength.” 

Aniekee Tochukwu

ponderous

“I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds.”

Virginia Woolf, from The Diary of Virginia Woolf

pondering

"Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something."

- Judith Butler, Precarious Life

pondering

"Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion."

- Mark Twain, from Mark Twain’s Notebooks

ponder

"Might the scientific approach be nothing but fear, flight from pessimism? A subtle form of self-defense from – the truth?"

- Friedrich Nietzsche, “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” from The Birth of Tragedy

ponder

The sky is one whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness.

— Henryk Sienkiewicz, The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall

ponder

"Man’s condition. Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety."

- Blaise Pascal, Pensees

ponder

"The very existence of superego means that you betrayed your desire."

- Žižek, 1994

ponder

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
—Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

ponder

"Baby you need to remember something, everyone thinks their own soul don’t stink."
~Miz Hyacinth, my Grandmother

quoth the madman

The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.

~Khalil Gibran

quoth the madman

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

~Marquis de Sade

ponder

"Be proud of your place in the Cosmos. It is small, and yet, it is."

Cecil Palmer

ponder

"Sadly, modern society has lost touch with the power of myth. We now use the word as a synonym for falsehood rather than as an expression of eternal truth."

~Clyde W. Ford, The Hero with an African Face

ponder

 

"لا أبحث عن نصفي الأخر لأنني لستُ نصفًا.
-I’m not searching for my other half because I’m not a half."

ponder

"How cruel the earth, the willows shimmering,
the birches bending and sighing.
How cruel, how profoundly tender."

~Louise Glück, from Vita Nova

ponderous

"I wish you everything good. I see great sadness in your eyes (do I imagine it?) but that seems to me inevitable and probably right. Sadness but no hardness. You must have moments of joy, or you could not live as violently as you do. It’s the one vitamin pill that no one has yet bottled, and which is essential: joy. I wish you that brief, rare, magical shining – you deserve it."

~Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters

pondering

"Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures."

~Antonio Machado, “Last Night As I Was Sleeping”

ponderous

"All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony?"

~Emil Cioran, On The Heights Of Despair

ponder

"Call me Ariadne, and I’ll thread you through every artery of my labyrinth heart. String a lyre from my second thoughts, Orpheus, and sing me out of every dark place I stumble into."

~S.T. Gibson

ponder

“What would I do without the absurd and the ephemeral?”

— Frida Kahlo, The Diary Of Frida Kahlo

quoth the madman

 

“I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute. Just as some people have a secret love for rainstorms, earthquakes, or blackouts, I liked that certain undefinable something directed my way by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it’s a kind of power that snares people and reels them in.”

— Haruki Murakami

ponder

“I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

pondering

Heaven must be a kind of fire, a burning down
of the previous mind, like sugar reduced
to charred carbon. A place you need
but cannot want. So what if we’re lied to,
at the last? I was hoping you’d disagree. If I could
touch your heart with the tip of my finger
and break you down like a shotgun, I would.
~Paul Guest, from “Letter to Jimmy Swaggart on Country Music, Sadness and Heaven,” The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World

ponder

"...crafting me like
a mosaic, a cathedral window;
every precious part of me
strained toward light."

Jan Richman, from “Lila,” Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything

ponder

What can the body do but enter
and be entered, if not by the mouth
of love, by words from mouths that made
love possible, or by the memory of words.
[…]
If the flesh is hushed, memory ravishes,
stands under loss, stupefied by understanding,
marries absence to desire, both being outside of time,
and makes a riddle of similitude.
Kathleen Peirce, from “Confession 9.10.25,” The Oval Hour: Poems

ponder

Such is the threnody of thistles–we are always hurt the ones we love, only to be left to love the ones we hurt, when we are always only hurting to be—loved.

— Charles Coakley Simpson, Thorns