Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That’s how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.
The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.
I imagined myself in some way defined by my relation to another creature.
Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.
My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen.
Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself.
What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth.
Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart’s position.
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.
Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.
Love won’t be tampered with, love won’t go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?
There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.