onceorlightly

[onceorlightly]

Sarah Kane, Crave

[onceorlightly]

David Mitchell, Slade House

[onceorlightly]

“To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.”

— Anthony Bourdain, in his final interview

[onceorlightly]

“We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent – see, he’s jealous, he cares – a woman shows how much she cares by how much she’s willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure.”

— Andrea Dworkin (via feministsorgnow)

[onceorlightly]

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

— G. K. Chesterton

[onceorlightly]

frank ohara

[onceorlightly]

when anne michaels said we belong where love finds us.

[onceorlightly]

“Der Ausdruck der Leute, die sich in Gemäldegalerien bewegen, zeigt eine schlecht verhehlte Enttäuschung darüber, dass dort nur Bilder hängen.”

— Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, S. 108

[onceorlightly]

“We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

Jeffrey Eugenides—The Virgin Suicides (2002)

[onceorlightly]

Mahmoud Darwish, from “She/He,” in Almond Blossoms and Beyond, tr. Mohammad Shaheen

[text ID: She: Have you ever known love? He: When winter comes, I will be touched by a passion for something absent. I will give it a name, any name, and will forget…]

[onceorlightly]

“To meet him, I go back to the Leningrad of 1964. The streets are devilishly cold: we sit on the pavement, he begins abruptly (a dry laugh, a cigarette) to tell me the story of his life, his words change to icicles as we speak. I read them in the air.”

Ilya Kaminsky, ‘Joseph Bodsky’, Dancing in Odessa

[onceorlightly]

Sometimes I think I’m never going to write a poem again and then there’s a full moon. I miss being in love but I miss myself most when I’m gone. In the salty wet air of my ancestry my auntie peels a mango with her teeth and I’m no longer writing political poems; because there are mangoes and my favorite memory is still alive. I’m digging for meaning but haunted by purpose and it’s an insufficient approach. What’s the margin of loss on words not spent today? I’m getting older. I’m buying smaller images to travel light. I wake up, I light up, I tidy, and it’s all over now.

— Camonghne Felix, “Born. Living. Will. Die.”

[onceorlightly]

“Well, if God doesn’t exist, who’s laughing at us?”

— From The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

[onceorlightly]

“Too many words, / but precious”

— John Ashbery, from “Uptick”

[onceorlightly]

“There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning, God was everywhere and everything. A totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists. “So God just leaves?” No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering. Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. But the sparrow still falls.”

— Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

[onceorlightly]

‘[…] das Versäumte geht um, gross wie die Schemen der Zukunft.’

—Paul Celan, ‘Nachts, wenn das Pendel der Liebe schwingt’

[onceorlightly]

‘Dein

Hinübersein heute Nacht.

Mit Worten holt ich dich wieder, da bist du,

alles ist wahr und ein Warten

auf Wahres.’

Paul Celan, ‘Dein Hinübersein’ (Aus ‘Die Niemandsrose’, 1959-63)