I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
—T. S. Eliot, from section III of “East Coker” in the Four Quartets (Harcourt, 1943)
“If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”
―Charles Simic
“God made man because He loves stories.”
—Elie Wiesel, from The Gates of the Forest (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966)
Only the poems remained,
scrawled on the rocks and trees,
Nothing’s undoing among the self-stung unfolding of things.
—Charles Wright, closing lines to ”In Praise of Han Shan,” from Buffalo Yoga (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004)
“It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams.”
—William Gass, from Fiction and the Figures of Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970)
Flannel shirt on a peg, curled
Postcards from years past
thumbtacked along the window frames.
Outside, deer pause on the just-cut grass,
The generator echoes our spirit’s humdrum,
and gnats drone high soprano …
Not much of a life, but I’ll take it.
—Charles Wright, closing lines to “Vespers” from Scar Tissue (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)
“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me—shapes and ideas so near to me, so natural to my way of being and thinking.”
—Georgia O’Keeffe
Painting: Georgia O’Keeffe, Pink Sweet Peas, 1926
(Source: happilyincomplete, via chasingtailfeathers)
“I sit before flowers
hoping they will train me in the art
of opening up.”
— Shane Koyczan, from The Student
(Source: larmoyante, via hsaptus)