Each man has a quiet that revolves
around him as he beats his head against the earth.
— Ilya Kaminsky, from “In Our Time (formerly, Of Deafness)”
(Source: hypocrite-lecteur)
Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.
— T. S. Eliot, from “Tradition and the Individual”
(Source: proustitute)
Vladimir Mayakovsky reads “А вы могли бы?” [And Could You?] (from 1913; English translation available here).
Paul Celan writes (in the notes and fragments collected under “Hostility to Art” in The Meridian):
“How does one make verses” º Mayakovsky tried to ask himself at a certain hour—withthis questionhe did. —the boat of his love shattered on the thusness \Sosein\ ⌊(and the refusal to want to be something other⌋ of human dailiness … Omnipotence puts it back together—
(Source: beetleinabox)
La nuit n’a nul pas besoin d’étoiles, nulle part on ne s’intéresse à nous.
— Paul Celan
(Source: yama-bato)
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
— T. S. Eliot, from “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
[prompted by odalisquia’s word suggestion: “nostalgia”]
(Source: proustitute, via journalofanobody)
bukowski’s poem “style”
When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style.
Style is the answer to everything.
Fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous day.
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style.
To do a dangerous thing with style, is what I call art.
Bullfighting can be an art.
Boxing can be an art.
Loving can be an art.
Opening a can of sardines can be an art.
Not many have style.
Not many can keep style.
I have seen dogs with more style than men.
Although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.
For sometimes people give you style.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Jesus.
Socrates.
Caesar.
García Lorca.
I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is a difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water, or you, walking
out of the bathroom without seeing me.
(Source: skinned-teen)
No one invents an absence:
Cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie
—see how the hand we would name restrains itself
till all our stories end in monochrome;
the path through the meadow
reaching no logical end;
nothing but colour: bedstraw and ladies’ mantle;
nothing sequential; nothing as chapter and verse.
No one invents the quiet that runs in the grass,
the summer wind, the sky, the meadowlark;
and always the gift of the world, the undecided:
first light and damson blue ad infinitum.
— John Burnside, “Si Dieu n’existait pas”
(Source: proustitute)
I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
(Source: proustitute)
