January 2012
109 posts
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“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
—Susan Sontag
December 2011
94 posts
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“Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall.”
—Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
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“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will...”
– Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
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“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of...”
– Cesare Pavese
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“Love is distinct from desire… Because its aim is not satisfaction, but being.”
– Jacques Lacan, Seminar I, trans. John Forrester
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“I saw your lips, your nakedness, the trees,
that dappled light. I dreamt of...”
– Luke Davies, from “[If every step taken is a step well-lived]”
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“I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns—O grass of graves…...”
– Walt Whitman
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“Time, as it flows, wears down and destroys that which is temporal.”
– Simone Weil
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“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature...”
– Søren Kierkegaard
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“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you...”
– Sylvia Plath, from “Elm”
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“We have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction.”
– Andrea Gibson
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“Stars and blossoming fruit trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an...”
– Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
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WatchThe Tree of Life (2011) by Terrence Malick
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“Give me truths,
For I am weary of the surfaces…”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson | excerpt from “Blight”
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“I need to rebel against myself. It’s the opposite of following your bliss. I...”
– Chuck Palahniuk
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“We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be...”
– Vaclav Havel’s Critique of the West
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“But use the hum
of your wound
and flamepit out everything
right to the edge...”
– Anne Carson, from “First Chaldaic Oracle” in Men in the Off Hours
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“It is necessary to touch impossibility in order to come out of the dream world. There is no impossibility in dreams. Only impotence.”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
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“For me it is the act of writing that unlocks the frame. I pin my tragedy onto...”
– Maggie MacKellar, When it Rains
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“Look at the past, that conduit of vapor…”
– Aaron Shurin, from “Sagacity” in Citizen
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“Explain that you live between two great darks, the first With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur Of hours and days, months and years, and believe It has meaning, despite the occasional fear You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing To prove you existed.”
Mark Strand, from “The Continuous Life”
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“The life of our body is only a constantly prevented dying, an ever postponed...”
– Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation
“For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of...”
– T. S. Eliot, from “The Dry Salvages” in The Four Quartets (via proustitute)
“It’s marvelous when we’re surprised by coincidences. Light or sound, in our...”
– John Cage, on experiencing the world as if it were art. [full interview here] (via nprfreshair)
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“So we turn back through the forest, walk among trees with long blue needles....”
– Tomas Tranströmer, from “Molokai” in The Great Enigma, trans. Robin Fulton
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“Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being? It is much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from having lived.
“That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.”
[…]
“To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice. Friendship is not to be...
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“Love is not consolation, it is light.”
– Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
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“We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.”
—Simone Weil
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“The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself: I still have it! Beings and things are not sacred enough to me. May I never sully anything even though I be utterly transformed into mud. To sully nothing, even in thought. Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could...
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“The eyes only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
– Henri Bergson
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“If this is about surrender, whose war are we really fighting and what happens...”
– approximation
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“Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”
– Ernestine Ulmer
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“My actions are my only true belongings.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
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“If one can speak, there is no fear. Beasts are graceful and strong.”
– Harold P Stern