Of Burning But Unwasting Fire

For, when what he knows as art is relegated to the museum and gallery, the unconquerable impulse towards experiences enjoyable in themselves finds such outlet as the daily environment provides.

- John Dewey, Art as Experience

Dum pudeo pereo (as I blush, I die) says an old love song. Blood rushes to the face, at the same time the heart seems to wither on itself and snap,

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and nessecary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world’s greatest benefactors),

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Death wanted to be this beautiful but we buried it

Garous Abdolmalekian, Sea tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

In a moment I could destroy the entire legend, from beginning to end, destroy everything, except the fundamentals

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

I want to say the poet is never afraid because he is unceasingly afraid, and therefore cannot become that which he already is

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

what are the best academic essays you’ve ever read?

audaces: a study in political phraseology

“domestici hostes”: the nausicaa in medea, the catiline in hannibal

catiline’s ravaged mind: “vastus animus”

the two voices of virgil’s aeneid 

in defence of catiline

antony, fulvia, and the ghost of clodius in 47 bc

the duplicate revelation of portia’s death

virgil’s carthage: a heterotopic space of empire

the taciturnity of aeneas

gender and the metaphorics of translation

And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn't know then that it wasn't even love I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

Ada Limón, Calling Things What They Are

the one that teaches water to become ice, helps grief remember how to become tears.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

theories which isolate art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing, are not inherent in the subject-matter, but arise because of specifiable extraneous conditions. […] Theory can start with and from acknowledged works of art only when the esthetic is already compartmentalized, or only when works of art are set in a niche apart instead of being celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience.

- John Dewey, Art as Experience