For Why Is It Meaningless To Write With No Other Function Than To Assuage Fear? Doesn’t That Function
For why is it meaningless to write with no other function than to assuage fear? Doesn’t that function in itself have a meaning? And why fear the dismantling of language’s semantic function, its being representational of meaning, when that is but one more fear that will drive those in opposition to écriture to write?
Mary Ruefle, On Fear
More Posts from Moonmovement and Others
The collective life that was manifested in war, worship, the forum, knew no division between what was characteristic of these places and operations, and the arts that brought color, grace, and dignity, into them.
- John Dewey, Art as Experience
One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
Willa Cather, Not Under Forty
I would count the number of times we had made love. I felt that each time something new had been added to our relationship but that somehow this very accumulation of touching and pleasure would eventually draw us apart. We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.
Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion
Look how much sadness you can make from showing sadness restrained.
- Heather Christle, The Crying Book
what I have done is risked everything for that hour, that hour in the black night, where one flashing light looks like love,
Ada Limón, Glow
My father bore a burden of impossible ambition. He wanted all things to be better than they were, beginning with himself and ending with this world. Maybe this was because he was a poet. Maybe all poets are doomed to disappointment.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
What fragments of her history live in my body?
- Heather Christle, The Crying Book
in that largeness of heart, that capacity for feeling and desire and passion, there's some kind of holiness.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
the one that teaches water to become ice, helps grief remember how to become tears.
- Heather Christle, The Crying Book
To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.
Richard Siken, Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors
