“We Cannot Simply Sit And Stare At Our Wounds Forever. We Must Stand Up And Move On To The Next Action.”

“Death smiles upon us all. All a man can do is smile back.”

— Marcus Aurelius

how do you sustain morale during a long project Lutheran guilt how do you sustain morale during a long project bourbon how do you sustain morale during a long project just smile how do you sustain morale during a long project pills can help

- Anne Carson, Wrong Norma

“There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I don’t want to be threatening, just feared enough to never have to make a fist.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib, “Ode to Drake, Ending with Blood in a Field”

on storytelling and repetition

“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

Cause and Effect

the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them

- Charles Bukowski

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

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

Getting ready for some shooting with AlexCollar

Can you guess what was prepared for me?

See it all on my Patreon page.

You think you are the greatest sufferer in the world?

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (via the-book-diaries)

“…do you sometimes long to escape?”

— Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (via the-book-diaries)