…a dark angel whispering to me to be easy on myself.
Half-Hanged Mary // Margaret Atwood
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MIND: Vigilant
Yes, I was wholly and entirely happy. If you could have uncored me, you would have seen every nerve running fire – intense, but calm.
// Virginia Woolf
MIND: Swell
Nothing like love to put blood back in the language.
// Margaret Atwood
MIND: Refreshed
She’s half-insane, looking for an out; she’s hard, she’s scared, she’s been fooled, taken, abused, used, over-used…
but, under all that, to me she’s the flower, I see her as she was before she was ruined by the lies: theirs and hers.
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense // Charles Bukowski
MIND: Ample
To be endlessly fascinating to each other —
To be more than that.
To be to each other, body and soul, sufficient reasons for living, though there might not be a single other satisfaction to be had.
// Kurt Vonnegut
MIND: Extrusive
What a world to study, to explore, in your night face. The face of a stranger, carved out of lava, like some oceanic goddess. More mysterious with eyes closed and features sculpted out of ancestral memories. An almost barbaric look, as if you had been resurrected from some ancient city.
// Henry Miller, from a letter to Hoki Tokuda
MIND: Floral
What Franz Kafka had to be so clear and simple about was that nothing is clear and simple. On his death bed he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead. All demarcations are shimmeringly blurred. Some powerful sets of opposites absolutely do not, as Heraclitus said, cooperate. They fight. They tip over the balance of every certainty. We can, Kafka said, easily believe any truth and its negative at the same time.
Kafka and Existentialism // Guy Davenport
MIND: Osmosis
Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.
// William Faulkner
MIND: Restless
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
// Susan Sontag
MIND: Exemplary
People do not see you,
They invent you and accuse you.
The Perjured City // Hélène Cixous
