December 2011
10 posts
“Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”
– Charles Bukowski
today's word:
confluence \ˈkän-ˌflü-ən(t)s, kən-ˈ\ , noun
1. a coming or flowing together, a gathering at one point
2. the flowing together of two or more streams
3. the place of meeting of two streams
from Summer Storm by Dana Gioia
There are so many might have beens, What ifs that won’t stay buried, Other cities, other jobs, Strangers we might have married.
And memory insists on pining For places it never went, As if life would be happier Just by being different.
here’s the rest of this beautiful poem.
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply...”
– William Butler Yeats
You don’t know nights of love? Don’t
petals of soft words float upon your blood?
Are there no places on your dear body
that keep remembering like eyes?
-from an untitled poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
“We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our...”
– Henry James
“In the summer
peaches the color of sunrise
In the fall
plums the color of dusk”
-from “The Beginning of September” by Robert Hass
today's word:
numinous \ˈnü-mə-nəs, ˈnyü-\ , adj.
1. mysterious, supernatural
2. filled with a sense of supernatural presence; holy
3. spiritually elevated; sublime
(i can’t stop saying numinousness.)
“The writer must write what he has to say. Not speak it.”
– -Ernest Hemingway
October 2011
2 posts
“It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right. We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like me make up all these rules to give us the illusion that we are in charge. I need to say to myself, they’re not...
July 2011
9 posts
[28 January 1908]
When I look at you, what I see is not the kissable and embraceable part of you, although it is so fine to look at, with the silken toss of hair curling over your ears. What I see is the deep spirit within. That I love and can go on loving all my life… Look, you are a nun, I give you what I would...
“Maturity means that you begin to fuse what is possible with what you wanted and also to see that your demands are often very exaggerated and very inhuman to others.”
from a great book of Anais Nin’s lectures, seminars and interviews, A Woman Speaks.
“Sensitive people, people who feel, want to unite in some deeper, subtler, more durable fashion than is permitted by custom and convention.”
from H. Miller’s Sexus
today's word:
abstemious \ab-ˈstē-mē-əs\ , adj.
1. marked by restraint especially in the consumption of food or alcohol
Walking Around
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre. Sucede que entro en las sastrerías y en los cines marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro Navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza.
El olor de las peluquerías me hace llorar a gritos. Sólo quiero un descanso de piedras o de lana, sólo quiero no ver establecimientos ni jardines, ni mercaderías, ni anteojos, ni ascensores.
Sucede...
June 2011
2 posts
“The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great…”
-Jack Kerouac
(i found this quote in a notebook of mine the other day. i remember seeing it in an alley in San Franscisco near City Lights Bookstore and finding it so appropriate and lovely.)
May 2011
10 posts
“A book lives through the passionate recommendation of one reader to another.”
-Henry Miller
“The dreamer seeks vainly to find a form and shape that will fit his ethereal essence. Like a celestial tailor, he tries on one body after another, but they are all misfits. Finally he is obliged to return to his own body, to reassume the leaden mold, to become a prisoner of the flesh, to carry on in torpor, pain and ennui.”
from Henry Miller’s Sexus
“Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom…I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could...
“‘Faith, always faith,’ said Francoise. ‘…Evidently, that makes everything secure. Your feelings must always wear the same faces, all neatly arranged around you, immutable. And even if there’s nothing inside it’s all the same to you. They’re like the white sepulchers of the Holy Bible—they sparkle on the outside. They’re firm,...
“Francoise looked at him in pained bewilderment. Up to then, when she thought: ‘We are separate,’ that separation was a misfortune that struck the both of them, one that together they could remedy. Now she understood that to be separate meant to live out the separation alone.”
from Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay
today's word:
miasma \mī-ˈaz-mə, mē-\ , noun
1. a vaporous exhalation formerly believed to cause disease; a heavy vaporous emanation or atmosphere
2. an influence or atmosphere that tends to deplete or corrupt
April 2011
59 posts
“I think every experience comes at a time when that experience is what you are ready for.”
-Anais Nin
“From joy! From enjoyment. The way the birds sing. I write when I’m in love with something—a scene, a character, a book, a country. ‘To paint is to love again,’ Henry said. For me, to write is to love again—to love twice.”
-Anais Nin when asked from what source she derived her desire to create.
“That is why I call the artist the magician, because he holds the anti-toxins to cure us when we are shattered, or when we are in a state of despair or sorrow about what is happening outside.”
-Anais Nin
”’—You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition. You’ve go to do it. You’ve got to learn no-to-be, before you can come into being.’”
Birkin in Women in Love
today's word:
literarylovers:
phantasmagoria \fan-ˌtaz-mə-ˈgȯr-ē-ə\ , noun
1. an exhibition of optical effects and illusions
2. a scene that constantly changes; a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined
3. a bizarre or fantastic combination, collection or assemblage
**I MISTAKENLY SPELLED THE WORD WRONG. I MUST’VE TYPED IT TOO FAST AND DIDN’T ADD THE...
