The poet takes the best things out of his life and puts them into his work. Hence his work is beautiful and his life bad.
- from "Notebooks"
1.31.2011
Anne Sexton :: 1.2011
Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds… but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives… locked outside of all that's real… do you know of such things, can you hear? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet… and yet to be behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong… to do it all wrong… believe me, (can you?) what's wrong. I want to belong… I'm not a member. I'm frozen.
1.28.2011
mistakes :: 1.2011
Conclusion of a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his 12-year-old daughter Scottie, away at summer camp, Aug. 8, 1933:
Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failures unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
“He didn’t want me to have the fun of making my own mistakes,” she wrote later. “He wanted to make them for me.”
--
via (http://www.futilitycloset.com)
1.26.2011
Rainer Maria Rilke :: 1.2011
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.
Charles Bukowski :: 1.2011
If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.
—(Factotum)
—(Factotum)
1.25.2011
Rilke :: 2010
It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Boundary :: 2010
"... if you cross a line and nothing happens,
the line loses meaning....
You keep drawing a line farther and farther away,
crossing it every time....
You'd be surprised at how easy it is ....
To lose yourself--to get lost.
Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised.
Maybe some of you already know.
To those people, I can only say: I'm sorry."
— Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
the line loses meaning....
You keep drawing a line farther and farther away,
crossing it every time....
You'd be surprised at how easy it is ....
To lose yourself--to get lost.
Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised.
Maybe some of you already know.
To those people, I can only say: I'm sorry."
— Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
Change :: 1.2011
If you are not going to change your route, why change your guide?
—Antonio Porchia
(From "Voices," 2003, W.S. Merwin, trans.)
(via journalofanobody)
—Antonio Porchia
(From "Voices," 2003, W.S. Merwin, trans.)
(via journalofanobody)
Ruth Stone :: 1.2011
This Strangeness in My Life
It is so hard to see where it is,
but it is there even in the morning
when the miracle of shapes
assemble and become familiar,
but not quite; and the echo
of a voice, now changed,
utterly dissociated, as though
all warmth and shared sweetness
had never been. It is this alien
space, not stark as the moon,
but lush and almost identical
to the space that was. But it is not.
It is another place and you are not
what you were but as though emerging
from the air, you slowly show yourself
as someone else, not ever remembered.
1.17.2011
Robert Bolañ :: 1.17.2011
"What twisted people we are.
How simple we seem...
and how spectacularly we
contort ourselves before our own eyes,
and the eyes of others...
How simple we seem...
and how spectacularly we
contort ourselves before our own eyes,
and the eyes of others...
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