dig

“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”

At the still point of mottled formations and a scruple of compassion.

“I should wish to live many years, free from hates,
and make my verses, as the rivers
that moisten the earth, fresh and pure.
Lord, give me a path with trees and birds.”

-Alfonso Guillén Zelaya, translated from the Spanish by William George Williams.

“rung upon rung laddering

across the unspeakable world

while in the midst of horror
we fed on beauty—and that,
my love, is what sustained us.”

-Rita Dove, Transit.