God’s pity! How long will it feel like burning?
26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
When I desire you a part of me is gone...
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
Under the seams runs the pain.
The beloved’s innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.
Caught between the tongue and the taste.
Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.