magnum opus

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Werner’s letter to Jutta in All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See

“There is pride, too, though--pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.”

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Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Racial purity, political purity--Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye--the body can never be pure.”

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Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they disappear forever.

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

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I’ll probably never be back here again, Tsukuru thought. And never see Eri again. We each have our paths to follow, in our places. Like Ao said, There’s no going back. Sorrow surged then, silently, like water inside him. A formless, transparent sorrow. A sorrow he could touch, yet something that was also far away, out of reach. Pain struck him, as if gouging out his chest, and he could barely breathe.

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

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One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

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turnstiles, skyscrapers

Leslie Kanes Weisman, Women's Environmental Rights: A Manifesto

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Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings ("The Value of Time")

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Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Milan Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

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wave goodbye to your family and friends, those lost ants and your eyes bleed when you see, cause nothing works inside

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transcribe

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A poem is not its words or its images, any more than a symphony is its notes or a river its drops of water. Poetry depends on the moving relations within itself. It is an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between individual consciousness and the world. The work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy, and I think human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions… To accept poetry in these meanings would make it possible for people to use it as an “exercise,” an enjoyment of the possibility of dealing with the meanings in the world and in their lives.

Muriel Rukeyser

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unfiltered sound

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spirit lead me where my trust is without borders let me walk upon the waters wherever You would call me take me deeper than my feet could ever wander and my faith will be made stronger in the presence of my Savior

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david gilbert, author, on why "call me ishmael" from moby dick is his favorite first line in a book

"It is both command and entreaty, a rechristening by way of pen scratching into paper. A second before this person was likely a John or a Philip, a Henry. A strange kind of pause lingers. An end before the beginning."