For What More Terrifying Revelation Can There Be Than That It Is The Present Moment?

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead. (Prescience? Perhaps.) 'Which means exactly what?' (Arched eyebrows, a little annoyed.) I tried to explain, but didn't do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin. This is what I wrote: To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

the tenderness…. 

Some of the first photographs ever taken inside the Lascaux caves (France, 1947).

she taught me the poems of these death-facing women and I understood them to be my mothers.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Does the earth fill the mouths of the dead to stop them from describing what they've seen?

Garous Abdolmalekian, Long Poem of Loneliness tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

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

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed.

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

since you were unable to take all the bad you were given learn now to fight with your nails for every inch of ground under your foot

Anna Czekanowicz, A Polish Mother tr. Regina Grol

I wish I had something else. A redemptive imagination

Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede