what hope, what joy

words blog.

[drowsily]

He knew what had been done to him but not what he had done to deserve it. It would have been a help if at some time some Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said People neither get what they deserve nor deserve what they get. The gentle and the trusting are trampled on. The rich man usually forces his way through the eye of the needle, and there is little or no point in putting your faith in Divine Providence... On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this?

William Maxwell, from So Long, See You Tomorrow

[drowsily]

...they lie curled together in what is not a very large bed sleeping the sleep of stones. The north wind howling around the corner of the house only serves to deepen this unknowing.

William Maxwell, from So Long, See You Tomorrow

[drowsily]

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

[drowsily]

He said that in a way being loved is like being told you never have to die. And I said: Yes—but it doesn't save you, does it. And he said: No—but it saves your sanity. Then I said: Are you afraid? And he said: Yes. And then I didn't cry anymore. Because he smiled.

Timothy Findley, from The Wars

[prewars]

I am distant even from my own distance. How distant, then, is Love?

—Mahmoud Darwish, from “Four Personal Addresses” in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems. University of California Press, 2003 

[aseaofquotes]

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

[drowsily]

To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest burning

T.S. Eliot, from “The Waste Land”

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

We do not remember our lives in a linear manner, viewing one incident following another, but rather as a mix of the actual and the hoped-for, of promise and regret.

Peter King, from “Memory and Exile: Time and Place in Tarkovsky’s Mirror,” Housing, Theory and Society (vol. 25, no. 1, 2008)

[lifeinpoetry]

Now I’ve grown up into a full-fledged liar. And loneliness says let us go through this again together, you and I.

— Mary Ruefle, from “At the Nipple,” The Adamant

[luthienne]

I know that darkness. Have stood on that bridge in the space between the streetlights dizzy with looking down. Maybe some darks are deep enough to swallow what we want them to. But you can’t have two worlds in your hands and choose emptiness.

Mary Szybist, from Incarnadine; “So-and-So Descending from the Bridge” (via luthienne)

[lifeinpoetry]

And if I should pick out the good in you – each shard of broken light, like glass from the wreck of such beauty, and look at that – or one golden afternoon when you hovered above me in rapture, oh half god – how would I bear to lift my hands, how would I bear to close my eyes and let you fall, and love be damned?

Cecilia Woloch, “Lucifer, Full of Light,” Carpathia (via lifeinpoetry)

[bostonpoetryslam]

My girlhood was Microscopic: a locked window overlooking the Sea. An atlas of the disaster: an un-lit hall and A shift in the waves of the field.

Cynthia Cruz, “January,” from Ruin 

[metaphorformetaphor]

Every pleasure […] becomes an experience of anticipated loss.

Susan Sontag, from The Volcano Lover (Picador, 2004)

[luthienne]

But the nights! All those towering summer nights! / And the stars, the stars of earth. / O to be dead one day and then to know them forever, / all the stars: for how, how, how, to forget them!

Rainer Maria Rilke from The Poetry of Rilke; “The Seventh Elegy”

[theijeoma-deactivated20180827]

Mother, i have pasts inside me i did not bury properly. Some nights, your daughter tears herself apart yet heals in the morning.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo (via keshmesheva)

[luthienne]

I must become the action of my fate.

June Jordan, from Things That I do in the Dark; “I Must Become A Menace To My Enemies” (via luthienne)

[das-grablied-deactivated2016061]

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (via noorshirazie)