A Writer's Ruminations

"Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent—better yet, the infinite—against the temporary, against the finite."

— Joseph Brodsky

"Language is the music of thought; it is what our ancestors called the soul."

— Andrei Voznesensky

"I scatter my voice to the four corners of the town
the water shapes time there
I mingle my body with the fragrances that emerge from night"

— Abdourahman Waberi, from “Truce” (translated by Patrick Williamson)

"What to do with this grief today? I don’t know what good is sadness unless we stand still with it, hold it under the tongue, savor it, and say to ourselves, “Here I am, if I had any doubt at all, here I am."

— Sandra Cisneros from her April 14, 2011 letter (via popca)

(via lover-root)

"Water: no matter how much, there is still not enough.
Come rain, come thunder, come deluged dams washed away,
Our thirst is unquenchable. A cloud in the water’s a siren.
We become two shades, deliquescent, drowning in song."

— Marin Sorescu, from “Fountains in the Sea” (translated by Seamus Heaney and Joana Russell-Gebbett)

"Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece."

— Henri Barbusse, Hell (translated by Edward J. O’Brien)

"Down there the scent of the sap and the flowers from the many gardens near the coast used to intoxicate me, and I wanted to burrow my fingers in the dark burning earth. I would roam about and try to remember your face, and draw in the perfume of your body. I would stretch my arms out in the air to touch as much as possible of your sunlight."

— Henri Barbusse, Hell (translated by Edward J. O’Brien)

"I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone."

— Henri Barbusse, Hell (translated by Edward J. O’Brien)

"A poet worth reading lives in the present, which keeps changing continuously into something else. What worked yesterday in poetry won’t work today, so a poet has no choice but to find means to confront the times he lives in. What doesn’t change, however, is that we are still what we were centuries ago, minds reading themselves for clues to the meaning of their existence, astonished now and then to be alive, while being acutely aware of their own mortality."

— Charles Simic, “Poetry and Utopia”

"In a sense, it seems I am drowning; already half-drowned to the ordinary dimensions of space and time, I know that I must drown, as it were, completely in order to come out on the other side of things (like Alice with her looking-glass or Perseus with his mirror). I must drown completely and come out on the other side, or rise to the surface after the third time down, not dead to this life but with a new set of values, my treasures dredged from the depth. I must be born again or break utterly."

— H. D., Tribute to Freud (via proustitute)