House of Fortitude

- Arkaye Kierulf / Autobiography

1.

You could say I grew up in a rough neighborhood: We owned boxing gloves. The red ones I loved, which represented fire and strength. I loved how they looked on me. It was rough because my uncle who lived next door was a blackbelter, and we were born with fists. My brother would wear black...

- Tomi Adegbayibi / Black Bird

There's a black bird. Pour the rum, the
cage won't hold. We've tipped centre
continent on tongues. Stutter, conditions
of nerves. We are saying bye bye, sugbon
me ti mo itumo dudu ninu wa. Clip the
wings of mercury. Calcify the song of she
in burnt ethanol. Everything is spillin...

- Frances Hodgson Burnett / The Secret Garden

"

In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to belie...

- Hernan Diaz / In the Distance

“A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love. The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature’s unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life sta...

- Boris Pasternak / Doctor Zhivago

“But, first, the idea of social betterment as it is understood since the October revolution doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm. Second, it is so far from being put into practice, and the mere talk about it has cost such a sea of blood, that I’m not sure that the end justifies the means. And la...

- Ezra Pound / Hugh Selwyn Mauberly [excerpt]

I

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old scene. Wrong from the start--

No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half-savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing ...

- Anna Akhmatova / The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn's approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven't faded yet.

In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.

But in...

- Vladimir Nabokov / Pale Fire

“Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abou...

- Arkaye Kierulf / Spaces

1.

In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.

2.

Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do ...

- Mark Z Danielewski / House of Leaves

“Two kisses in one kiss was all it took, a comfort, a warmth, perhaps temporary, perhaps false, but reassuring nonetheless, and mine, and theirs, ours, all three of us giggling, insane giggles and laughter with still more kisses on the way, and I remember a brief instant then, out of the blue, ...

- Albert Camus / The Rebel

“Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we...

- Alice Notley / Millions of Us

"Purportedly a chain of civilians, soldiers, voices

lice they were called. It is sometimes sufficient to beg

Lice creeping over one, kill them with a chemical;

then there are lice-ghosts everywhere. Glints of pearly

nails. The light of my beloved will keep me from noticing...

- Stanley Kunitz / The Collected Poems

“The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to ...

- Arkaye Kierulf / Textbook Statistics

On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die.
So we’re ahead by 3.22, which is good, I think.

The average person will spend two weeks in his life
waiting for the traffic light to change.

Pubescent girls wait two to four years
for the tender lumps under their nipp...

- Vladimir Nabokov / Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

"My purpose in writing my Texture of Time, a difficult, delectable and blessed work, a work which I am about to place on the dawning desk of the still-absent reader, is to purify my own notion of Time. I wish to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse, for I do not believe that its essence can...

- Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliarie...

- Mary Gaitskill / Veronica

“We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass, blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a you...

- Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“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...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

"

[Silence]

 FIRST VOICE (Very softly)

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,
courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow,...

- Mary Gaitskill / Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays

“But I think that this apparent desire to be a victim cloaks an opposing dread: that Americans are in truth profoundly, neurotically terrified of being victims, ever, in any way. This fear is conceivably one reason we initiated the particularly vicious and gratuitous Iraq war―because American...

- Aja Monet / My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter

“The ghosts of women once girls

Somewhere a little girl is reading aloud
in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles
at the sound of her own voice escaping
the spine of the book. she feeds her hunger
to know herself. She has not yet been taught
to dim, she si...

- Alice Notley / Perhaps Not For You

There is

no

audience

because

there is

no audience.

So if you speak only to

imagined beings

what does "only" mean?

--------------------------

This building formerly a restaurant . . .

this small room has been scraped of its paint&nb...

- Vladimir Nabokov / Pale Fire

“Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abou...

Winter 2024/2025 (BTS)

- Chuck Palahniuk / Fight Club

"Everything in heaven is quiet, rubber-soled shoes.
I can sleep in heaven.

People write to me in heaven and tell me I'm remembered. That I'm their hero. I'll get better.
The angels here are the Old Testament kind, legions and lieutenants, a heavenly host who works in shifts...

- William Gaddis / The Recognitions

“How ... how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to ...

- Ocean Vuong / On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Tell me it was for the hunger

& nothing less. For hunger is to give

the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light

whittled down by another war

is all that pins my hand

to your chest.

i

You, drowning

between my arms ...

- John Updike / Self-Consciousness

“Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How sole...

- Albert Camus / The Rebel

“Meanwhile, the triumphant revolution, in the aberrations of its nihilism, menaces those who, in defiance of it, claim to maintain the existence of unity in totality. One of the implications of history today, and still more of the history of tomorrow, is the struggle between the artists and the...

- Robert Louis Stevenson

“The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of...