"How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travelers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel to cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who are fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse."
- Jeanette Winterson
The Passion
The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?
To be whole, it is enough to exist.
At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
it worth having been born.
- Fernando Pessoa
"We all proceed with approximately the same speed toward the same destiny. But some of us are enjoying the trip more than others."
- James Park
Why are people called Buddhas
After they die?
Because they don't grumble any more,
Because they don't make a nuisance
Of themselves any more.
- Ikkyu
"The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them."
- Jean Cocteau
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word "finite" (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves)
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality as truth.
- Jeanette Winterson
Rough Guide
Impossible to look directly into
another's eyes. Impossible to look
into your own. You read the dense book
of being like a document you flick through.
Eyes, even an inch apart, are blurs,
clouds, like the concept of yesterday
which has an entity you sometimes stray
into beyond the limits of his and hers,
The unknown: the roughest of the rough guides,
and all it says is: you're here, you'd better make
the best of it. You entered by mistake
and so you'll leave. It's what the route map hides
and languages obscure, the magnetic pull
of all you ever see of the beautiful.
But I have seen the beautiful. I know
its contours and the rough guide it provides
is blissfully specific: the hand that rides
the ridge of the collarbone or moves along the brow,
the perfect form of momentary light
in this line or another. It's what Blake
saw at the top of the stair, the terrible earthquake
at the root of the flesh we think of as delight.
It's what you see when you shut your eyes and see,
the angel with the whip or a flaming sword
that burns your eyes down to the spinal cord,
the shit, blood, semen smell of mortality
you get used to because it follows you
everywhere and is both beautiful and true.
- George Szirtes
Reel
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while."
- Joan Didion
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
