"How can I express the darkness?"
- Virginia Woolf
"My earliest wish was not to exist.
To burst in the backyard without violence.
No blood, no fleshy bits. Mute button pressed.
Alone behind the rectory where no one would see me.
This wasn’t a plea to be found or mourned for,
but to be unborn into the atmosphere.
To hang in the humid air, as ponds vent upward from the overheated earth.
To hang in the humid air, as ponds vent upward from the overheated earth.
Rise until they freeze and crystallize,
then drop into the aquifer."
then drop into the aquifer."
- Eliza Griswold
"This is how you live when you have a cold heart, as I do:
in shadows, trailing over cool rock, under the great maple trees.
in shadows, trailing over cool rock, under the great maple trees.
The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it.
I feel it glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.
Living things don’t all require light in the same degree.
Some of us make our own light:
a silver leaf like a path no one can use,
a shallow lake of silver in the darkness under the maples.
Some of us make our own light:
a silver leaf like a path no one can use,
a shallow lake of silver in the darkness under the maples.
But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension,
love all that is cold."
love all that is cold."
- Louise Glück
"Mine is a world foregone though not yet ended—
an imagined garden grey with sundered boughs
and broken branches, wistful and unmended,
and mist that is more constant than all vows."
- Hart Crane
"What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams."
- Werner Herzog
"I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers.
I have seen men, for the most part, grow better, not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from most unpromising subjects."
I have seen men, for the most part, grow better, not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from most unpromising subjects."
- C. S. Lewis
"Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"Those of us who are the smiley types:
we’re friendly and nice and give a good impression. And really, we can con a lot of people onto thinking we’re just terrific.
Like all the time, terrific.And you should feel very grateful in your life when you come across someone who just doesn’t buy it.
And all of the hidden stuff you don’t like to think about is somehow suddenly very present:
your superficiality, the way you don’t quite tell the truth.
They cut through your hypocrisy.
You’re exposed, but you’re also free."
we’re friendly and nice and give a good impression. And really, we can con a lot of people onto thinking we’re just terrific.
Like all the time, terrific.And you should feel very grateful in your life when you come across someone who just doesn’t buy it.
And all of the hidden stuff you don’t like to think about is somehow suddenly very present:
your superficiality, the way you don’t quite tell the truth.
They cut through your hypocrisy.
You’re exposed, but you’re also free."
- Pema Chödrön
"These are the days that must happen to you."
- Walt Whitman
"As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose.
And we ourselves are, too."
And we ourselves are, too."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Be not the slave of your own past.
Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."
Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
