the woman in blue, she's asking for revenge; the man in white--that's you--says he has no friends

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

" 'Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.'

"I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. 'Gets away from what, though?'

" 'From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn't really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like 'happy' and 'good' will never find her.'

" 'You don’t want her to be happy and good?'

" 'I'm not sure what's really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.' "
--Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching


"Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood."
--C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces


"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
--Ursula K. Le Guin


"All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate."
--Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds


"Summer Silence"
Eruptive lightnings flutter to and fro
Above the heights of immemorial hills;
Thirst-stricken air, dumb-throated, in its woe
Limply down-sagging, its limp body spills
Upon the earth. A panting silence fills
The empty vault of Night with shimmering bars
Of sullen silver, where the lake distils
Its misered bounty.--Hark! No whisper mars
The utter silence of the untranslated stars.
--e. e. cummings


"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
--James Baldwin


"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it."
--James Baldwin


"Birds were what became of dinosaurs. Those mountains of flesh whose petrified bones were on display at the Museum of Natural History had done some brilliant retooling over the ages and could now be found living in the form of orioles in the sycamores across the street. As solutions to the problem of earthly existence, the dinosaurs had been pretty great, but blue-headed vireos and yellow warblers and white-throated sparrows, feather-light, hollow-boned, full of song, were even greater. Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs."
--Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History


"There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless.' There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard."
--Arundhati Roy


"Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind."
--Henry James


Before your late night face, passing
solitary
between
nights that reshaped me too,
something came to stand there
that was already with us once before, un-
moved by thought.

*

Numbers, in league
with the undoing of images
and the un-
undoing.

Skull clapped over them,
on whose
insomniac temples a chimer-
ical hammer
sings it all
to the world's
beat.

*

Paths into the shadow-rut
of your hand.

From the four-finger-furrow
I root out
petrified blessing.

*

The shipwrecks of heaven sail on--
masts
sung earthward.

You sink your teeth
into this wooden
song--

You are--the song-lashed
colors.

*

Once,
I heard him there,
he was washing the world,
unseen, all night,
really.

One, and unending,
annihilated,
I-
hilated.

There was light. Salvation.
--Paul Celan, from Breathturn, translator unknown


"Unfortunate Coincidence"
By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying--
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
--Dorothy Parker


"No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better."
--Erin Bow


" 'All our messianic wars,' Leo explained, realizing that the word imperialism and the citations from American history were having a misleading effect, 'have been fiascoes. We have mistaken our role. We cannot carry democracy abroad with military expeditions or food shipments. We can only receive it here, when it comes to us for entrance. America is ideally a harbor, a state of the utmost receptivity. It is not our role to lead, but to be open. America, I imagine, if this plan can be put into effect, will disappear, at least as we know it. America is only a vessel, waiting to be filled, a preparation for something that has not yet happened. That is what we all have been sensing in the air, ever since we were children, a restless, bemused expectancy of an event that will come to stay with us, like a visitor. I remember,' he went on, 'those summer afternoons on a lake in New Jersey, with a still haze floating over everything and a phonograph playing somewhere, and a row boat drifting in the water, as if time itself were pausing, just on the edge of the incredible. I express myself very badly,' he interpolated, slipping into a more ordinary voice."
--Mary McCarthy, The Oasis


"Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper."
--Ray Bradbury


"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."
--Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House


February 7
Shadows loaded with stones
the barbed wire
you forgot the proper pronunciation
of your name.
A black cat runs
with the moon tied to its tail.
Strange.
Such great silence
and nobody wakes.
--Yannis Ritsos, from Diaries of Exile, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley


May 14
We've gotten used to the gulls
they bring no message
they open and close their wings
as if opening and closing the shutters
in an empty house.

We've gotten used to the sleepless nights
to sleep shattered like broken windowpanes
to the cripples with their crutches
the filth on the beach
the bread ration thrown into the sea
the potato peelings stuck on the rocks
like gutted intestines
the shadow of a cloud over Sounio across the way
the sound of the chain falling into the water at night
we've gotten used to people forgetting us.

And that statue without arms
was beautiful
you didn't know where it was pointing
or if it was.
--Yannis Ritsos, from Diaries of Exile, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley


May 15
The guard sits behind the barbed wire
the lapels of his trench coat raised.
The other day I noticed his arms
they are thick and strong
he would have carried the flag in one of our parades.

Now he sits behind his rifle
as if behind a wall.
Behind the wall sits spring--
he can't see it.
I see it and smile
and I'm sad
that he can't see it.
He's bound the shadow of his rifle around my eyes
as if it were a black handkerchief,
but I want him to see spring and smile.
--Yannis Ritsos, from Diaries of Exile, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley


May 17
The hospital boat mirrored in the water
white with an apricot stripe way up high
is beautiful
in the bowl of morning quietness
like an old sorrow in a new poem.
--Yannis Ritsos, from Diaries of Exile, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley