I want to experience my past again, but as I was then, doing what I did then—nothing changed.
In what sense, then, am I not living through it, again and again?
Isn’t the past always happening?
— Elisa Gabbert, from "Wild Animals (Normal Distance)," Normal Distance
“But this is the power of memory: the person who owns it can morph it to [his or her] desire.”
— Lauren Groff, from “To the Man I Believe Was Good,” Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, ed. Colleen Kinder (Algonquin Books, 2022)
Czesław Miłosz, from “The Song” (tr. Czesław Miłosz), New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001
[Text ID: “All joy comes from the earth, there is no delight without her, man is given to the earth, let him desire no other.”]
“The heart and mind of another are unknowable, even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections that are really elements of the knower’s own life, not the other’s.”
— Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge
“It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2020)
“He was smiling.”
— Christopher Pike, from “Collect Call I”
“ ‘A person is a person through other people’ strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through [a] recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.”
— Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa
“People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”
Simone Weil, “Chance” (trans. Emma Craufurd), Simone Weil: An Anthology
[Text ID: “The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.”]
“But he was the star of the show.”
— Casey Wilson, from “Tears of a Clown”
“‘Be free.’”
— Bethany C. Morrow, from So Many Beginnings
“It’s a good day to be alive.”
— Justina Ireland, from Dread Nation
“‘But if you didn’t leave me a lock of red hair,’ she said slowly, 'then who did?’”
— P.J. Night, from Truth or Dare
“And everything stayed unsaid.”
— Ingeborg Bachmann, tr. by Eavan Boland, from “Departure from England,” (via violentwavesofemotion)
