Quote File: Shadows on the Rock | August 25, 2006
‘Are you tired, Jacques?’
‘A little, my legs are,’ he admitted.
‘Get on the sled and I will pull you up. See there’s the evening star—how near it looks! Jacques, don’t you love winter?’
She put the sled-rope under her arms, gave her weight to it, and began to climb. A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from neighbours’ houses. If the Count should go back with the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city (yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break for just this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of being in one’s own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the deep sea.
—Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock
Posted 2:25 PM
Link ::
Quote File: The Brothers Karamazov | July 23, 2006
“I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic. Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit. Here, they’ve brought your fish soup—help yourself. It’s good fish soup, they make it well. I want to go to Europe, Alyosha, I’ll go straight from here. Of course I know that I will only be going to a graveyard, but to the most, the most precious graveyard, that’s the thing! The precious dead lie there, each stone over them speaks of such ardent past life, of such passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, and their science, that I—this I know beforehand—will fall to the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them—being wholeheartedly convinced, at the same time, that is has all long been a graveyard and nothing more. And I will not weep from despair, but simply because I will be happy in my shed tears. I will be drunk with my own tenderness. Sticky spring leaves, the blue sky—I love them, that’s all! Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength… Do you understand any of this blather, Alyoshka, or not?”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (t. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
Posted 3:11 PM
Link ::
Quote File: King Dork | July 3, 2006
homoeroticism: dudes being turned on by dudes, or dudes ridiculing other dudes by behaving as they believe dudes who really are turned on by dudes behave with respect to those dudes they are turned on by, under the impression that this is hilarious or otherwise worthwhile. As irritating as this is for dudes who in fact are not turned on by dudes, it must be even worse for those who are.
That’s from the glossary of Frank Portman’s King Dork, which is almost as funny as the book itself.
Posted 3:06 PM
Link ::
This strange state | March 10, 2006
I rose, anyway, and took away Demmie’s nail file. I tucked her in. Her mouth was naively open as she gave up the file. I got her to lie down but she was disturbed. I could see that. As she laid her head on the pillow, in profile, one large lovely eye stared out childishly. “Off you go,” I said. She shut the staring eye. Her sleep was instantaneous and seemed deep.
But in a few minutes I heard what I expected to hear—her night voice. It was low hoarse and deep almost mannish. She moaned. She spoke broken words. She did this almost every night. The voice expressed her terror of this strange place, the earth, and of this strange state, being. Laboring and groaning she tried to get out of it. This was the primordial Demmie beneath the farmer’s daughter beneath the elegant Main Line horsewoman, Latinist, accomplished cocktail-sipper in black chiffon, with the upturned nose, this fashionable conversationalist. Thoughtful, I listened to this. I let her go on a while, trying to comprehend. I pitied her and loved her. But then I put an end to it. I kissed her. She knew who it was. She pressed her toes to my shins and held me with powerful female arms. She cried “I love you” in the same deep voice, but her eyes were still shut blind. I think she never actually woke up.
—Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
Posted 12:11 PM
Link ::
Orange cowboy boots | January 9, 2005
“Not know thyself, know thy selves. All the yous, all the years, the days of Magda and Pauline, and orange cowboy boots, and when you believed penises grew back inside a man at forty years old.
We look at who we were, once upon a time, and see that person as stupid or amusing, but never essential. Like flipping through old snapshots of ourselves wearing funny hats or big lapels. How silly I was back then, how naive.
And how wrong to think that! Because now when you are incapable of doing it, those yous still know how to fly, find the way into a forest or out of a library. Only they can see the lizards and fill holes that need to be filled.”
—Jonathan Carroll, The Wooden Sea
Posted 1:11 PM
Link ::
Insects | January 29, 2004
Robert Heinlein:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Posted 7:09 PM
Link ::
Stillness | January 17, 2004
From Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning:
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Posted 3:11 PM
Link ::
The Loft | December 13, 2003
A poem by Richard Jones.
I lay on her bed
while she opened windows
so we could see the river
and the factories beyond.
Afternoon light falling
beautifully into the room,
she burned candles,
incense, talking quietly
as I listened—
I, who conspired
to make this happen,
weaving a web of words that held
this moment at its center.
What could I say now?
That I am a man
empty of desire?
She stood beside the bed,
looking down at me
as if she were dreaming,
as if I were a dream,
as if she too had come
to the final shore of longing.
I lay, calm as a lake
reflecting the nothingness
of late summer sky.
Then she spoke—
she said my name—
and I, who did not love her,
opened my arms.
Posted 1:28 PM
Link ::
Pointer | December 6, 2003
Jonathon Delacour quotes John Szarkowski on photography:
As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person—a mute Virgil of the corporeal world—who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross, perhaps, between theater and criticism) would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.
Posted 12:34 AM
Link ::
Doorstep | November 29, 2003
“It’s odd who I tell and who I don’t. But for the most part I don’t tell anyone I know. I fantasize about telling strangers everything. I want to tell this Chinese American woman with a son at the supermarket. I want to tell the person who takes my toll at the bridge. I want to drive in search of lifeguards and fireman and tell them. I want to give the information like a baby in a bundle on a doorstep to people who will never know who I am. I can tell them and move on. Drive off and they will never hold it against me. Never try to explain future actions with what happened in the past. I do not want to be judged by this forever.”
—Vendela Vida, And Now You Can Go
Posted 12:40 PM
Link ::
The Rebel | November 3, 2003
“In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.”
—Albert Camus
Posted 4:10 PM
Link ::
Tedious | September 25, 2003
“It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
—Oscar Wilde
Posted 12:53 PM
Link ::
Comments (2)
Dance | May 10, 2003
Henry Miller (1891-1980):
“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!”
Posted 1:50 PM
Link ::
Song of the Day | January 19, 2003
A Perfect Circle - Sleeping Beauty
Delusional
I believed I could cure it all for you, dear
Coax or trick or drive or
drag the demons from you
Make it right for you, Sleeping Beauty
Truly thought
I could magically heal you
You’re far beyond a visible sign of your awakening
Failing miserably to rescue
Sleeping Beauty
Drunk on ego
Truly thought I could make it right
If I kissed you one more time to
Help you face the nightmare
But you’re far too poisoned for me
Such a fool to think that I could wake you from your slumber
That I could actually heal you…
Sleeping Beauty
Poisoned and hopeless
You’re far beyond a visible sign of your awakening
Failing miserably to find a way to comfort you
Far beyond a visible sign of your awakening
And hiding from some poisoned memory
Poisoned and hopeless
Sleeping Beauty
Posted 12:00 PM
Link ::