A Poet Reflects

Don’t sign your name
between worlds,

surmount
the manifold of meanings,

trust the tearstain,
learn to live.

Paul Celan, from Glottal Stop: 101 Poems, trans. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh, (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)

beingmemm:

“If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer.””

—David Deida 

(Source: larmoyante)

aneleh:

“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.”

—Jack London

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” 

—Henry Miller

“Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.”

—Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking Penguin, 2005)

“I don’t want to live—I want to love first, and live incidentally.”

—Zelda Fitzgerald, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1919
 

litverve:

“By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.”

—William B. Irvine from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy  (Oxford University Press, 2008)

(Source: blogut)

jeanetteleblanc:

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?”

—Henry James, The Ambassadors (Harper and Brothers, 1903)(via lotusohm)