Mary Oliver, RIP

Below, in honor of her passing, a poem she wrote that once spoke for me.

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song,
And I say to my heart: rave on.

– Mary Oliver, Thirst

TFTD

But you have in [in The Deerslayer] the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

— D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

TFTD

Yo creo que un escritor qué merezca este nombre debe hacer todo lo que esté a su alcance para favorecer una 'mutación' del lector, luchar contra la pasividad del asimilador de novelas y cuentos, contra esa tendencia a preferir productos premasticados. La renovación formal de la novela — para emplear sus términos — debe apuntar a la creación de un lector tan activo y batallador como el novelista mismo, de un lector que le haga frente cuando sea necesario, que colabore en la tarea de estar cada vez más tremendamente vivo y descontento y maravillado y de cara al sol.

— Julio Cortazar, “El escarabajo de oro”

TFTD

Like a monk, sentencing himself to ascesis, tormented by erotic visions, I would take shelter in rhythm and the order of syntax, because I was afraid of my chaos.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog

TFTD

Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

— William Faulkner, "The Art of Fiction No. 12"

Old Art, New World

TFTD

Only people with some strength of character can be truly gentle: usually, what seems like gentleness is mere weakness, which readily turns to bitterness.

—La Rochefoucauld

TFTD

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

TFTD

Fail better.

— Samuel Beckett, Westward Ho

TFTD

I'm going to take your brain out of your head and wash it and scrub it and make it clean.

— Dirk Diggler, Boogie Nights

TFTD

It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

— James Baldwin, "My Dungeon Shook"

TFTD

Certain people permanently change what we perceive as beautiful. Like a good writer they teach us to see beauty where we'd failed to see it. These are the people we come to love, sooner or later; they make the world richer, more expansive, and its beauty more abundant.

TFTD

I love my country too much to be a nationalist.

— Albert Camus, "On the Future of Tragedy"

TFTD

The anti-utopias of our century (Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell) depicted societies under total control where the absence of freedom was called freedom. In such societies, the rulers take care to supply the ruled with suitable diversions to prevent mental anxiety. Sexual games best fulfill that function. It is a credit to the intuition of the authors of those books that they depict Eros acting as a subversive force, which is no secret to the authorities: sex is anti-erotic and not only poses no threat but effectively prevents the appearance of the passions, which draw persons, not bodies, together and engage them both as flesh and as spirit. The hero enters upon a dangerous path when he is awakened by love. Only then is the slavery that was in disguise and accepted by everyone revealed to him as slavery.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Visions of San Francisco Bay

TFTD

Mother, father—always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.

— The Tree of Life

TFTD

There is a tale of necessity within every vulgar story.

— Amelie Rorty, "Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love and the Hilarity of True Love"

TFTD

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practice charity.

— Albert Camus, The Fall

TFTD

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent. . . . That's what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything would be just a joke.

— Albert Camus, The Fall

TFTD

I welcome that first mistake.

— Yo-Yo Ma

TsFTD

La originalidad es la hija de la imitación.

Quien dice poesía dice amor.

— Octavio Paz, "El llamado y el aprendizaje"