"Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that's all."
- Albert Camus
commonplace
"You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn't have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It's far more common, and therefore more lethal."
- Zadie Smith
Intimations
just literature quotes
"Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution."
- William S. Burroughs
commonplace
"Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. So, a man seeking knowledge must be first tested to determine if he is worthy."
- Tom Robbins
Jitterbug Perfume
And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my
mind.
Therefore, dark past,
I'm about to do it.
I'm about to forgive you
for everything.
- Mary Oliver
from A Settlement
What Do We Know
In the Mountains on a Summer Day
Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.
- Li Bai
translated by Arthur Waley
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
- May Sarton
from The Work of Happiness
The Lion and the Rose
running after my hat
"To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry. To the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its magic. To the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace. As its options (no matter how absurd or unlikely) diminish, so do its chances for the future."
- Tom Robbins
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
In the Mushroom Summer
Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower,
mist in the pines so thick the crows delight
(or seem to), winging in obscurity.
The ineffectual panic of a squirrel
who chattered at my passing gave me pause
to watch his Ponderosa come and go -
long needles scratching cloud. I'd summited
but knew it only by the wildflower meadow,
the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian,
scattered among the locoweed and sage.
Today my grief abated like water soaking
underground, its scar a little path
of twigs and needles winding ahead of me
downhill to the next bend. Today I let
the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.
- David Mason
"My friend Suzie told me while I was driving her home from that bar about the real meaning of the blindfolded figure of Justice holding the scales. Suzie was drawing her own tarot cards and rethinking each card as she went. Justice, a book on classical lore asserted, stood at the gates of Hades deciding who would go in, and to go in was to be chosen for refinement through suffering, adventure, transformation, a punishing route to the reward that is the transformed self. It made going to hell seem different. And it suggested that justice is a far more complicated and incalculable thing than we often imagine, that if everything is to come out even in the end, then the end is farther away than anticipated and far harder to estimate. It suggests too that to reside in comfort can be to have fallen by the wayside. Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side. Finally she drew a group around a campfire as her picture of justice, saying that justice is helping each other on the journey."
To a visitor who described
himself as a seeker after
Truth the Master said, "If
what you seek is Truth,
there is one thing you must
have above all else."
"I know. An overwhelming
passion for it."
"No. An unremitting readiness
to admit you may be wrong."
- Anthony De Mello
One Minute Wisdom
"The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite, and that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable. The general condition of the soul, therefore, is stoic hunger, stoic loneliness. Paul Éluard wrote, "There is another world, and it is in this one."
- Stephen Dunn
Walking Light
"Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love"
- Franz Wright
Walking to Martha's Vineyard
I've decided to make up my mind
about nothing. To assume the water mask,
to finish my life disguised as a creek,
an eddy, joining at night the full,
sweet flow, to absorb the sky,
to swallow the heat and cold, the moon
and the stars, to swallow myself
in ceaseless flow.
- Jim Harrison
from Cabin Poem
hammock papers
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
