Immeasurable emptiness

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us—that's snatched right out of our hands—even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.

- Haruki Murakami

The time that is given us

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

— J.R.R. Tolkien

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Afterlife

Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. Apparently the faith — I thought it faith — which enables me to pray for the other dead has seemed strong only because I have never really cared, not desperately, whether they existed or not.

- CS Lewis

The Fellowship of the Ring

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

— J.R.R. Tolkien 

1722

Her face was in a bed of hair,
Like flowers in a plot—
Her hand was whiter than the sperm
That feeds the sacred light.
Her tongue more tender than the tune
That totters in the leaves—
Who hears may be incredulous
Who witnesses, believes.

- Emily Dickinson

Our revels now are ended

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

- William Shakespeare

Atrocities

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

- Voltaire

Between Going and Coming

Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

- Octavio Paz

Remembering

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

- Rilke

"Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The..."

Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are stuck with admiration at some of its transient modifications; but it is itself the great miracle.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Death Leaves Us Homesick

Death leaves Us homesick, who behind,
Except that it is gone
Are ignorant of its Concern
As if it were not born.

Through all their former Places, we
Like Individuals go
Who something lost, the seeking for
Is all that's left them, now.

- Emily Dickinson

When the War is Over

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again

- W. S. Merwin

Charm

The owl is abroad, the bat, and the toad,
And so is the cat-a-mountain,
The ant and the mole sit both in a hole,
And the frog peeps out o' the fountain;
The dogs they do bay, and the timbrels play,
The spindle is now a turning;
The moon it is red, and the stars are fled,
But all the sky is a-burning:

The ditch is made, and our nails the spade,
With pictures full, of wax and of wool;
Their livers I stick, with needles quick;
There lacks but the blood, to make up the flood.
Quickly, Dame, then bring your part in,
Spur, spur upon little Martin,
Merrily, merrily, make him fail,
A worm in his mouth, and a thorn in his tail,
Fire above, and fire below,
With a whip in your hand, to make him go.

- Ben Johnson

Memories

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don't ever see them fading.

- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Secret Beatnik

I am kind of a secret beatnik hiding in the suburbs in my square house on a dull street.

- Anne Sexton

In medias res

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

- Mona Simpson, in the eulogy for her brother Steve Jobs

Small Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives... on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

- Carl Sagan, commenting on a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager I from the edge of the solar system, 4 billion miles away.

Pagani's, November 8

Suddenly discovering in the eyes of the very beautiful
Normande cocotte
The eyes of the very learned British Museum assistant.

- Ezra  Pound

Li Po

It was at a wine party—
I lay in a drowse, knowing it not.
The blown flowers fell and filled my lap.
When I arose, still drunken,
The birds had all gone to their nests,
And there remained but few of my comrades.
I went along the river—alone in the moonlight.

Blue Nights

This book is called “Blue Nights” because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.

Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

- Joan Didion

Life

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusion most stale and unprofitable.

- Arthur Conan Doyle

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

- William Carlos Williams

In my craft or sullen art

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages, 

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

- Dylan Thomas

Bring me the sunflower

Bring me the sunflower so I may transplant it
in my native soil burnt by the sea-salt,
let it display all day to the mirroring blue spaces
of the sky the anxiety of its yellow face.

Obscure things tend towards clarity,
bodies dissolve themselves in a weightless flow
of colors: these then into music. To vanish
is thus the supreme fate of all fates.

Bring me the plant that points to where
pale transparencies rise to the heights
and life itself evaporates like air;
bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

- Eugenio Montale

Illness

I have not yet seen that case in which a "diagnosis" led to a "cure", or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore enforced, debility.

- Joan Didion

Favourite Books

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

- Neil Gaiman

The Dead

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

- Rupert Brooke

Everyone must leave something behind

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Insomnia

Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
That wavers with the spirit's wind:
But in half-dreams that shift and roll
And still remember and forget,
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, well you never know whether he's gone
If sometimes you're catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly mid-on
And it could be me and it could be thee.

- Roy Harper

Ridiculous

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

- Agatha Christie

Song of Myself

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

- Walt Whitman

Braver Thank You Think

If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. i'll always be with you."

- A. A. Milne

I have been one acquainted with the night

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right
I have been one acquainted with the night.

- Robert Frost

Safe

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You may kill him — another will be born.
Deeds and words shall be recorded.

- Czeslaw Milosz

Fall

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

- Hemingway

Progress

Another instance of a realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother's death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying.

- Tolstoy

The Name of the Rose

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors."

- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Small Creatures

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

- Carl Sagan

You will find out everything

You will die and find out everything — or cease asking.

- Tolstoy

Why

Why all the embarrassment
about being happy?
Sometimes I'm as happy
as a sleeping dog,
and for the same reasons,
and for others.

- Wendell Berry

The Patient

But the patient's concentration is distilled, moment by moment: breathing, not being sick, not coughing, coughing in the right way.

Death stays when the visitors have gone, and the nurses turn a blind eye; he leans back on his throne, crosses his legs, and says: "Entertain me."

- Hilary Mantel

Tintern Abbey

...As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

- W. Wordsworth

I am a humanist

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Smart or Stupid?

And yet, other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid …

– Carl Sagan

Mother Night

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. 

- Susan Ertz

It is time

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Autumn Day (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

The trouble with being a critical thinker

I think the trouble with being a critical thinker, or an atheist, or a humanist is that you're right. And it's quite hard being right in the face of people who are wrong without sounding like a fuckwit. People go "Do you think the vast majority of the world is wrong?", well yes, I don't know how to say that nicely, but yes.

- Ellen DeGeneres