'so what can we really do for each other except--just love each other and be each other's witness? and haven't we got the right to hope--for more? so that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?'
β james baldwin, another country
'if life is a hollow form, a negative mold, all the grooves + indentations of which are agony, disconsolations + the most painful insights, then the casting from this β¦ is happiness, assentβmost perfect + most certain bliss.'
β susan sontag, reborn
'in the beginning i was so young and such a stranger to myself i hardly existed. i had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before i knew at all who i was, what i was, what i wanted to be.'
β mary oliver, upstream: selected essays
'although of course being incorrect is always the hardest, but even that is becoming less important. the world will not stop if i make a mistake.'
β audre lorde, the cancer journals
'people who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things..'
β james baldwin, giovanni's room
'i shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it is everywhere! i shall involve myself wholly β¦ everything matters! the only thing i resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect.'
β susan sontag, reborn
'and when they bombed other people's houses,
we protested but not enough,
we opposed them but not enough.
we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.'
β ilya kaminsky, deaf republic
'i wept until i aged myself. i watched it happen in the mirror. i watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill.'
β maggie nelson, bluets
'fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity, coffee and bread with sour plum jam. numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods. lives ticking on as if.'
β adrienne rich, what kind of times are these from later poems: selected and new 1971-2012
freedom. it isnβt once....
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. from all the lost collections.'
β adrienne rich, a wild patience has taken me this far