Paul Auster, Invisible, excerpts

I will be robbed of my old age. I try not to feel bitter about it, but sometimes I can't help myself. Life is shit, I know, but the only thing I want is more life, more years on this godforsaken earth.

Deere Mom Ime in the lake Lov Andy

You take her in your arms and whisper: I don't want to go. You say it again I don't want to go. And then you step back from her, put your head down, and go.

Unbidden, a forgotten verse from Ecclesiastes comes roaring into his consciousness. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly... As he jots down the words in the right-hand margin of his poem, he wonders if this isn't the truest thing he has written about himself in months. The words may not be his own, but he feels that they belong to him.

For the next three days, he steadfastly adheres to this regimen of silence. He sees no one, talks to no one, and bit by bit he begins to feel somewhat stronger in his loneliness, as if the stringencies he has forced upon himself have ennobled him in some way, reacquainting him with the person he once imagined himself to be.

~ Paul Auster, From: Invisible

Assorted Quotes, Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle.


Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides; in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.


Alas! must it ever be so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Craig Arnold, excerpts

From: "Meditation on a Grapefruit"

                             a discipline
precisely pointless       a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause     a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without



From: "The Invisible Birds of Central America"

Perhaps they are not multiple         but one
a many-mooded trickster         whose voice is rich
and infinitely various         whose feathers
liquify the rainbow         rippling scarlet
emerald indigo         whose streaming tail
is rare as a comet's         a single glimpse of which
is all that you could wish for         the one thing
missing         to make your eyes at last feel full
to meet this wild need of yours         for wonder



From: "Incubus"

                              And that would be their secret.   
The power to feel another appetite
pass through her, like a shudder, like a cold
lungful of oxygen or hot sweet smoke,
fill her and then be stilled. The freedom to fall
asleep behind the blinds of his dark body
and wake cleanly. And when she swings her legs
over the edge of the bed, to trust her feet
to hit the carpet, and know as not before
how she never quite trusted the floor
to be there, no, not since she was a girl
first learning to swim, hugging her skinny
breastless body close to the pool-gutter,
skirting along the dark and darker blue
of the bottom dropping out—
                              Now she can stand,
and take the cup out of his giving hand,
and feel what they have learned inside each other
fair and enough, and not without a kind
of satisfaction, that she can put her foot
down, clear to the bottom of desire,
and find that it can stop, and go no deeper.

Uncouplings BY CRAIG ARNOLD

There is no I in teamwork
but there is a two maker

there is no I in together
but there is a got three
a get to her

the I in relationship
is the heart I slip on
a lithe prison

in all communication
we count on a mimic
(I am not uncomic)

our listening skills
are silent killings

there is no we in marriage
but a grim area

there is an I in family
also my fail

 ~ Craig Arnold, "Uncouplings"

"Bird-Understander" by Craig Arnold

Of many reasons I love you here is one

the way you write me from the gate at the airport
so I can tell you everything will be alright

so you can tell me there is a bird
trapped in the terminal all the people
ignoring it because they do not know
what do with it except to leave it alone
until it scares itself to death

it makes you terribly terribly sad

You wish you could take the bird outside
and set it free or (failing that)
call a bird-understander
to come help the bird

All you can do is notice the bird
and feel for the bird and write
to tell me how language feels
impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander
better than I could ever be
who make so many noises
and call them song

These are your own words
your way of noticing
and saying plainly
of not turning away
from hurt

you have offered them
to me I am only
giving them back

if only I could show you
how very useless
they are not

~ Craig Arnold, "Bird-Understander"

“The Untrustworthy Speaker” Louise Glück

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted-

I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That's why I can't account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We're the cripples, the liars:
We're the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When a living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.

~ Louise Glück, "The Untrustworthy Speaker"

Waiting for Godot, Act 1, beginning and end. Samuel Beckett

A country road. A tree.


Evening.

...

ESTRAGON:
Well, shall we go?

VLADIMIR:
Yes, let's go.
They do not move.

Curtain.

~ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act 1. Opening and closing lines of script.

From: Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

There were worse reasons to keep a person hostage. You keep someone always for what he or she is worth to you, for what you can trade her for, money or freedom or somebody else you want more. Any person can be a kind of trading chip when you find a way to hold her. So to hold someone for a song, because the thing longed for was the sound of her voice, wasn't it all the same?

...

As if music was a separate thing you could drive yourself into, make love to, fuck.

...

Gen, in his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words... It had occurred to him in his life that he had the soul of a machine and was only capable of motion when someone else turned the key. He was very good at working and he was very good at being by himself. Sitting alone in his apartment with books and tapes, he would pick up languages the way other men picked up women, with smooth talk and then later, passion.

...

"I'll shoot you, too, if I have to. Show me how to peel an eggplant. I've shot men over less than an eggplant."

...

He had never been so easy inside his own skin. He thought at once he had never been so alive and so much a ghost.

~ Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Hell, Franz Wright

but if they were condemned to suffer
this unending torment, sooner or later
wouldn't they become holy?

~ Franz Wright, "Hell"

from: Clarification by Franz Wright

Listen to what I am saying,

but listen especially
to what I am not saying--

Of all the powers of love,
this: it is possible

to die; which means
it's possible to live.

Now it is possible to die
without being mad or afraid.

~ Franz Wright, from "Clarification"

Anaïs Nin,from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, volume 4

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

~ Anaïs Nin,from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, volume 4

"Night Walk," Franz Wright

The all-night convenience store's empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday's newspaper--
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home, for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

~ Franz Wright, "Night Walk"

“Self Portrait“ by David Whyte

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

~ David Whyte, "Self Portrait"