Don’t Ask For Guarantees. And Don’t Look To Be Saved In Any One Thing, Person, Machine, Or Library.

What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.

— Kaveh Akbar, from Martyr!

We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker (via the-book-diaries)

This August I began to dream of drowning

Anne Sexton, from "Imitations of Drowning" in The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

“But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death–these are the things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual to individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all.”

Albert Camus, Create Dangerously

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“The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold… The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war between princes.” - Michel de Montaigne, Essais

The Sopranos (1999‑2007)

And, finally, [Vetinari] kept Leonard around because the man was easy to talk to. He never understood what Lord Vetinari was talking about, he had a world view about as complex as that of a concussed duckling and, above all, never really paid attention. This made him an excellent confidant. After all, when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.

- Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.”

— Albert Camus

Ocean Vuong, “A Letter to my Mother that She Will Never Read” The New Yorker, May 2017 

i rub the scratches on my arms. the deep indigo around my eyes. i draw a bath.

hold my head underwater. come up when my lungs flail their fists. i drink in the air

like holy wine, like my last salvation. tomorrow may burn. but i’ll be ready for it.

— Wanda Deglane, from “This Ending I Learn to Love,” published in Glass