Latest Posts by moonmovement - Page 2

Truth. What ferocity in your quest for it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is a danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

I could feel his teeth, the inside of his mouth, the shape of his thighs, the texture of his skin. I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about his own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show himself and be seen at the same time.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

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

I was only time flowing through myself.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

Winter is king, raindrops sing, gardens drip with loss.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty

but indirectly children know everything there is to know. They just don't know why.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty

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 am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

Ada Limón, The Hurting Kind

The true and serious beauty  of trees, how it seemed insane that they should offer this to us, how unworthy we were, bewildered how soon we were nearly weeping at their trunks as they tossed down petal after petal, and we tried to remember how it felt to receive and notice the receiving

Ada Limón, Hooky

What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.

Ada Limón, It’s The Season I Often Mistake

How much more drama can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

Ada Limón, “I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”

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

Years later, back from Mexico or South America, he'd admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it,

Ada Limón, Cyrus & The Snakes

And of course there was music, though it was me and my incessant remembering.

Ada Limón, Banished Wonders

I want them to go on kissing, without fear. I want to watch them and not feel so abandoned by hands. Come home. Everything is begging you.

Ada Limón, It Begins With The Trees

I take the soil in

my clean fingers and to say

I weep is untrue, weep is too

musical a word. I heave

into the soil. You cannot die.

I just came to this life

again, alive in my silent way.

- Ada Limón, Invasive

There is a solitude in this world

I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

- Ada Limón, Drowning Creek

the poet paralyzed with fear lying in a hammock on a beautiful day—unhappy man in a happy world—does not suffer any less when he looks around him; he does not cease to suffer, he only ceases to try to understand.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

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

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

Nervous awe and apprehension are born out of proximity and attention. The greater the intimacy between these cultures and nature, the greater the tension. The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

I remember thinking my father was mean but knowing he was kind. I remember thinking my father was kind but knowing he was mean.

Mary Ruefle, Woodtangle

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

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