Dig

“I’m going to play until the end of this life.

[…]

It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.” -(GZ)

“Can you hear me? I gesture
mutely to the parking lot. The trees
do not answer; they’re trees, 
                        and know better.”

-Tarfia Faizullah, Poem Without Love

“… pause

and sprawl in the grass while I read to you
the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting

to hear. I read until you finally slept”

-Tarfia Faizullah, The Poem You’ve Been Waiting For

“Conflict is a condition of intellectual life, and, I believe, its pleasure.”

“… language—informed, shaped, reasoned—will become the hand that stays crisis and gives creative, constructive conflict air to breathe, startling our lives and rippling our intellect.”

“… the critical voice that upholds tradition and communal values and that also provides occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restrictions.”

“just as we watch other life, other life watches us” (TM)

“The obvious stole over us like awe,

That it was our own silhouette we saw”

–A.E. Stallings, Sublunary

“Something touched his imagination for a moment” JB

“life is very long, unless it is not.” – Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape.

[…]

trying to live as best they can in the presence of such enormous, distracting absences

[…]

then he will step out, into the light, to inhabit the form of another” – Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

“… shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children

[…]

This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”

–Maggie Smith, Good Bones.

“didn’t care for crowds—being in them, or whatever foolishness they tended to enjoy en masse”