“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be...
2025-04-26 11:26:17 +0000 UTC View Post
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smi...
“those who gave me the most pleasure. You know why? Because you’re an idiot, and even to fuck well it takes a little intelligence. For example you don’t know how to give a blow job, you’re hopeless, and it’s pointless to explain it to you, you can’t do it, it’s too obvious that it d...
2025-04-25 08:18:46 +0000 UTC View Post
“You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everythin...
2025-04-25 08:18:15 +0000 UTC View Post
“Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover...
2025-04-24 08:22:10 +0000 UTC View Post
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood...
"Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give ...
“Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is ...
2025-04-23 10:18:07 +0000 UTC View PostIt's a fine, sunny morning in London Town and I am feeling curious. With a few notable exceptions, I don't actually know who the members of this humble little endeavour are. I would love to find out which of the following descriptions best captures you:
2025-04-22 09:44:58 +0000 UTC View Post
"I wakened myself last night with my own shouting. It must have been that terrible yellow plant I saw pushing through the flood-damp soil near the log by Tinker Creek, the plant as fleshy and featureless as a slug, that erupted through the floor of my brain as I slept, and burgeoned into the drea...
2025-04-22 07:30:03 +0000 UTC View Post
“Do not despair—many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell's bells and all's well—half the world is at peace with itself, and so is the other half; vast areas a...
2025-04-22 07:29:37 +0000 UTC View Post
"Because in middle youth he had often sat obser
2025-04-21 10:00:31 +0000 UTC View Post
"Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you somet...
Scheherazade
“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
...
“He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in...
2025-04-19 08:24:44 +0000 UTC View Post
"… I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven there’s nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that woul...
2025-04-18 09:53:24 +0000 UTC View Post
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor prec...
2025-04-18 09:53:06 +0000 UTC View Post
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that we...
2025-04-17 09:52:38 +0000 UTC View Post
"
We are the centuries.
We are the chin-choppers and the golly-woppers, and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head.
We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam, and we march in cadence behind you, chanting rhymes that some think odd.
Hut two threep foa!
“Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants someth...
2025-04-16 12:20:51 +0000 UTC View Post
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later ...
2025-04-15 09:13:04 +0000 UTC View Post
“What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting...
“If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a lett...
2025-04-14 09:07:14 +0000 UTC View Post
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the c...
2025-04-14 09:07:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“I'll try. The Big Bang banged, a naked singularity. Lots happened in the first three minutes; I forget just what. Then eons passed: galaxies condensed and sprang away from one another like disenchanted lovers, at speeds proportional to the square of their distances, something like that. At las...
2025-04-13 11:39:27 +0000 UTC View Post
“I catch myself carefully scrutinizing the loved body (like the narrator watching Albertine asleep). To scrutinize means to search: I am searching the other's body, as if I wanted to see what was inside it, as if the mechanical cause of my desire were in the adverse body (I am like those childr...
2025-04-13 11:39:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for,...
2025-04-12 11:58:45 +0000 UTC View Post
“Children make you see distances. What do you mean “distances”? Lazer paused and picked an olive from the plate. He spun it slowly on the toothpick. Well for example this morning I was sitting at my desk at home looking out on the acacia trees that grow beside the balcony beautiful trees ve...
2025-04-12 11:58:30 +0000 UTC View Post
“Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strike...
2025-04-11 07:36:47 +0000 UTC View Post
"
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your ma...