• under this section you can find quotes from poetry

• Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries by A. E. Housman

--

• "These, in the days when heaven was falling, / The hour when earth's foundations fled, / Followed their mercenary calling / And took their wages and are dead. // Their shoulders held the sky suspended; / They stood, and the earth's foundations stay; / What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay."

• Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes by William Shakespeare

--

• "When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, / And look upon myself and curse my fate, / Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, / Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, / Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, / With what I most enjoy contented least; / Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, / Haply I think on thee, and then my state, / (Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate; / For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

• From Huntress by Hilda Doolittle

--

• "Come, blunt your spear with us,"
• "Can you come, / can you come, / can you follow the hound trail, / can you trample the hot froth?"

• from Voices by Antonio Porchia

--

• "The little things are what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity."

• from Sound of the War by Vicente Aleixandre

--

• "I'm lying down and all I can see is the stars. / The hole in my chest breathes / like a stupid mistake."

• Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, as translated by W. S. Merwin

--

• "In the house of poetry, nothing remains except that which was written with blood to be listened to by blood."
• "(The poet must achieve a balance) between solitude and solidarity, between feeling and action, between intimacy of one's self, the intimacy of mankind, and the revelation of nature."
• "He reminded readers that even if they'd been to hell and back, they could still fall in love, experience beauty and rapture, nurse their indignities and personal tragedies, and still appreciate that 'the best poet is the man who delivers our daily bread.'" (from the introduction by Christina García)

• Epiphany, 1937 by George Seferis

--

• "-- / I’ve kept a rein on my life, kept a rein on my life, travelling / among yellow trees in driving rain / on silent slopes loaded with beech leaves, / no fire on their peaks; it’s getting dark. / I’ve kept a rein on my life; on your left hand a line / a scar at your knee, perhaps they exist / on the sand of the past summer perhaps / they remain there where the north wind blew as I hear / an alien voice around the frozen lake. / -- / I’ve kept a rein on my life whispering in a boundless silence / I no longer know how to speak nor how to think; whispers / like the breathing of the cypress tree that night / like the human voice of the night sea on pebbles / like the memory of your voice saying ‘happiness’. / -- // I’ve kept a rein on my life, with him, looking for the water that touches you / heavy drops on green leaves, on your face / in the empty garden, drops in...__and a dog leapt and your heart shuddered,...__ // The snow / and the water frozen in th...

• There's a Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson

--

• "There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons – / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes – // Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – / We can find no scar, / But internal difference – / Where the Meanings, are – // None may teach it – Any – / 'Tis the seal Despair – / An imperial affliction / Sent us of the Air – // When it comes, the Landscape listens – / Shadows – hold their breath – / When it goes, 'tis like the Distance / On the look of Death – "

• Ode I. 11 by Horace

--

• "Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate, / Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers / In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes. / This could be our last winter, it could be many / More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks: / Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines / And forget about hope. Time goes running, even / As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair."

• selected poems (excerpts) by Louise Glück

--

• Vita Nova: "You saved me, you should remember me. // The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. / Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms. // When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling. // I remember sounds like that from my childhood, / laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, / something like that. -- // Crucial / sounds or gestures like / a track laid down before the larger themes // and then unused, buried. -- // Surely spring has been returned to me, this time / not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet / it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly. "
• The Untrustworthy Speaker: "Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. / I don’t see anything objecti...

• Wild Swans by Edna St. Vincent Millay

--

• " I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over. / And what did I see I had not seen before? / Only a question less or a question more; / Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying. / Tiresome heart, forever living and dying, / House without air, I leave you and lock your door. / Wild swans, come over the town, come over / The town again, trailing your legs and crying!"

--

• Sonnet XLIII by Edna St. Vincent Millay

--

• "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, / I have forgotten, and what arms have lain / Under my head till morning; but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonig...__Yet knows its boughs more silent than bef...__ / A little while, that in me sings no mo...

• Achilles in the Trench by Patrick Shaw-Stewart

--

• "I saw a man this morning / Who did not wish to die; / I ask, and cannot answer, / If otherwise wish I. // Fair broke the day this morning / Upon the Dardanelles: / The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks / Were cold as cold sea-shells. // But other shells are waiting / Across the Aegean Sea; / Shrapnel and high explosives, / Shells and hells for me. // Oh Hell of ships and cities, / Hell of men like me, / Fatal second Helen, / Why must I follow thee? // Achilles came to Troyland / And I to Chersonese; / He turned from wrath to battle, / And I from three days' peace. // Was it so hard, Achilles, / So very hard to die? / Thou knowest, and I know not; / So much the happier am I. // I will go back this morning / From Imbros o'er the sea. / Stand in the trench, Achilles, / Flame-ca...

• Small Song by A.R. Ammons

--

• "The reeds give way to the wind / and give the wind away."

• Sappho

--

• "Stand and face me, my love, / and scatter the grace in your eyes."
• "Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us."
• "Love shook my heart / Like the wind on the mountain / rushing over the oak trees."
• "You came, and I needed you, / and you cooled the fever of my longing that racked my heart."

• selected poems by Federico García Lorca

--

• All: "The hand of the wind / stokes the face of space / again / and again. / The stars droop / their blue eyelids / again / and again."
• Half Moon: "The moon slides across the water / How can the sky be so calm? / Slowly the moon scythes / the river's old tremble / The young frog uses her / as a little mirror."
• He Died at Daybreak: "Night of four moons / and only one tree / with only one shadow / and only one bird // I search my skin for / the mark of your lips / The water kisses the wind / without touching it // I have the No you gave me / in the palm of my hand / like a wax lemon / almost white // Night of four moons / and only one tree / On the point of a needle / my love spins—"

• In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

--

• The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
• Petals on a wet, black bough.

• "In Kyoto..." by Basho, as translated by Jane Hirshfield

--

• In Kyoto,
• hearing the cuckoo,
• I long for Kyoto.

• Kobayashi Issa

--

• Watching the river
• through a window of trees...
• spring rain falls

• Devotions, The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

--

• "August of another summer, and once again / I am drinking the sun --"
• "So, be slow if you must, but let / the heart still play its true part."
• "Why am I always going anywhere, instead of / somewhere?"
• "Come with me into the woods where spring is / advancing, as it does, no matter what, --"
• "It took four of us to carry her into the woods. / We did not think of music, / but, anyway, it began to rain / slowly. -- A dog can never tell you what she knows from the / smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know / almost nothing. -- She roved ahead of me through the fields, yet would come back, or wait...

• Poetry Is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens

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• "That's what misery is, / Nothing to have at heart. / It is to have or nothing. // It is a thing to have, / A lion, an ox in his breast, / To feel it breathing there. // Corazón, stout dog, / Young ox, bow-legged bear, / He tastes its blood, not spit. // He is like a man / In the body of a violent beast. / Its muscles are his own . . . // The lion sleeps in the sun. / Its nose is on its paws. / It can kill a man."

• Ye Goatherd Gods by Sir Philip Sidney

--

• "-- Long since I hate the night, more hate the morning; / Long since my thoughts chase me like beasts in forests, / And make me wish myself laid under mountains. // -- // I wish no evenings more to see, each evening; / Shamed, I hate myself in sight of mountains, / And stop mine ears, lest I grow mad with music. --"

• selected poems by Anna Swir

--

• I cannot: "I envy you. Every moment / You can leave me. // I cannot / leave myself."
• Happy as a Dog's Tail: "Happy as something unimportant / and free as a thing unimportant. / As something no one prizes / and which does not prize itself. / As something mocked by all / and which mocks at their mockery. / As laughter without serious reason. / As a yell able to outyell itself. / Happy as no matter what, / as any no matter what. // Happy / as a dog’s tail."
• "-- One must hurry / before death comes. For by then / like a dog jerked by its chain / I will have to return / into this stridently suffering body. --"

• Scary Movies by Kim Addonizio

--

• "-- This / is how it feels to lose it— // not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is / that helps you get up in the morning / and actually leave the house / on those days when it seems like death // in his brown uniform / is cruising his panel truck / of packages through your neighborhood. / I think of a friend’s voice // on her answering machine— / Hi, I’m not here— / the morning of her funeral, / the calls filling up the tape // and the mail still arriving, / and I feel as afraid as I was / after all those vampire movies / when I’d come home and lie awake // all night, rigid in my bed, / unable to get up --"

--

• Stay by Kim Addonizio

• Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

--

• "You do not have to be good.
• You do not have to walk on your knees
• for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
• You only have to let the soft animal of your body
• love what it loves.
• Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
• Meanwhile the world goes on.
• Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
• are moving across the landscapes,
• over the prairies and the deep trees,
• the mountains and the rivers.
• Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
• are heading home again.

• Dearly by Margaret Atwood

--

• "And birds. There are more birds in these poems than there used to be. I wish for even more birds in the next book of poems, should there be one; and I wish also for more birds in the world. Let us all hope."

--

• "It's late, it's very late; / too late for dancing. / Still, sing what you can. / Turn up the light: sing on, / sing: On."
• "Were things good then? / Yes. They were good. / Did you know they were good? / At the time? Your time? / No, because I was worrying / or maybe hungry / or asleep, half of those hours. / Once in a while there was a pear or plum / or a cup with something in it, / or a white curtain, ripp...

• my brother at 3 a.m. by Natalie Diaz

--

• "-- The sky wasn’t black or blue but the dying green of night. / Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives. --"

• selected poems by Jane Hirshfield

--

• A Chair in Snow:
• "A chair in snow / should be / like any other object whited / & rounded / and yet a chair in snow is always sad / more than a bed / more than a hat or house / a chair is shaped for just one thing / to hold / a soul its quick and few bendable / hours / perhaps a king / not to hold snow / not to hold flowers"

--

• For What Binds Us:
• "There are names for what binds us: / strong forces, weak forces. / -- / The way things stay so solidly / wherever they've been set down— / and gravity, scientists say, is weak. / And see how the flesh grows back / across a wound, with a great vehemence, / more strong / than the simpl...__And when two people have loved each other...__ / stronger, darker, and proud; / how the...

• selected poems by W. S. Merwin

--

• Separation: "Your absence has gone through me / Like thread through a needle. / Everything I do is stitched with its color."
• Do Not Die: "In each world they may put us / farther apart / do not die / as this world is made I might / live forever"
• Wish: "Please one more / kiss in the kitchen / before we turn the lights off"
• Provision: "All morning with dry instruments / The field repeats the sound / Of rain / From memory / And in the wall / The dead increase their invisible honey / It is August / The flocks are beginning to form / I will take with me the emptiness of my hands / What you do not have you find everywhere"
• For a Coming Extinction: "Gray whale / Now that we are sending you to The End / That great god / Tell him / That we who follow you invente... --"

• Mirkka Rekola

--

• "Without moving anything / I want to see / the way this autumn / makes the birds move."
• "The nights are no longer warm, / The green tomatoes are cold to their cores, / The sparrows rock empty feeders with fright, / The doves linger forlornly in the low junipers, / The lights of the city thicken the November night."
• "Fog covers this region. / Can you still hear my voice? / I don't understand trees. / They try to grab our hair. / A branch has fallen on you. I know that. / Could you look behind me: / is there a load / on my back, as well?"
• "Sickle moon still there in daylight. / We long for things as they were. / We want them back, / our blue-black nights, and ...

• Muso Soseki

--

• By its own nature
• It towers above
• The tangle of rivers
• Don’t say it’s a lot of dirt
• Piled high
• Without end the mist of dawn
• The evening cloud
• Draw their shadows across it
• From the four directions
• You can look up and see it
• Green and steep and wild.

• Basho

--

• Lightning flash—
• what I thought were faces
• are plumes of pampas grass.

• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

--

• "Do you take it I would astonish? / Does the daylight astonish? or the early redstart twittering through the woods? Do I astonish more than they? / This hour I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody but I will tell you."
• "And I know I am solid and sound, / To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, / All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means."
• "I know I am august, / I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, / I see that the elementary laws never apologize, / I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by after all."
• "I exist as I am, that is enough, / If no other in the world be aware I sit conten...

• Du Fu

--

• The moon's reflected on the river a few feet away,
• A lantern shines in the night near the third watch.
• On the sand, egrets sleep, peacefully curled together,
• Behind the boat I hear the splash of jumping fish.

• under this section you can find quotes from fiction

• Inferno of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

--

• "And then, like someone labouring for breath / who, safely reaching shore from open sea, / still turns and stares across those perilous waves, --"
• "The stars that rose when I first stirred now fall."
• "What is the point? Why kick against your fate?"
• "You are the sun who heals all clouded sight."
• "Yet if we dream, near dawn, of what is true, --"
• "-- Allow no wave of thought / henceforth to break around his memory. / Attend to other things. / And let him be."
• "Less shame -- makes clean / far greater fault than yours has been. And so / cast ...

• Circe by Madeline Miller

--

• "It was my first lesson. Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two."
• "But my mind could imagine no further than that. I had never felt a lash. I did not know the colour of my blood."
• "'How do they bear it?' 'As best they can.'"
• "When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world."
• "The flowers hung lank around us, wan and fragile as moth wings."
• "This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh."
• "A look flashed in his eyes, like teeth in a wolf's mouth."

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

--

• "And it's not just sudden terror. It's a cozy, comfortable terror with a permanent seat at the table. I've felt it for a long time."
• "I fall to the floor and put my head in my hands. I can't hold anything back. I cry like a child."
• "I wish to God this wasn't on my shoulders."
• "We all have to make sacrifices. If I have to be the world's whipping boy to secure our salvation, then that's my sacrifice to make."
• "I'm lucky to be alive. There's no other way to put it. Anything I do beyond that moment is a gift from the universe to me."

• King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo

--

• "Stop punishing yourself for being someone with a heart. You cannot protect yourself from suffering. To live is to grieve. You are not protecting yourself by shutting yourself off from the world. You are limiting yourself."

• Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

--

• "I remembered how hard a thing indifference was to bear."
• "The pain was welcome, ordinary and clean. So easy to bear it was laughable."
• "True is what men believe, and they believe this of you."
• "My shame is caustic, searing every nerve. It is like a nightmare; I expect, each moment, to wake to relief. But there is no waking. It is true. He will not help."
• "My mind is filled with cataclysm and apocalypse: I wish for earthquakes, eruptions, flood. Only that seems large enough to hold all of my rage and grief. I want the world overturned like a bowl of eggs, smashed at my feet."
• "He likes this image of himself, the wronged young man, stoically accepting the th...

• Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

--

• "Smells unleashed from the spring thaw lift us into a frenzied desperation for movement. The air is so clean you can smell the difference between smooth rock and jagged. You can smell water running over shale."
• "Inhale small fears they turn into doubts into words into ideas into anger into hatred into violence. / Exhale large fears and large words they tumble back onto you it's easy to get buried by our own mirrors. / Inhale small fears and they whisper and travel to your mind observe them and thank them for trying to protect you. / Exhale acknowledgement of the beauty within your instincts and the courage to love small fears. / -- Exhale calmness in acknowledgement of the beauty within the cou...

• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

--

• "I know that she returns to the labyrinth often. Sometimes we go together; sometimes she goes alone. The quiet and the solitude attract her strongly. In them she hopes to find what she needs.
• It worries me.
• 'Don't disappear,' I tell her sternly. 'Do not disappear.'
• She makes a rueful, amused face. 'I won't,' she says.
• 'We can't keep rescuing each other,' I say. 'It's ridiculous.'
• She smiles. It is a smile with a little sadness in it."

--

• "'A lot of missing people turn up at seaside places,' he muses. 'It's the sea, I s...

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

--

• "They fought as though the most important thing was to damage each other as much as possible."

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

--

• "-- Because afterwards, thinking about what she'd said, I realised she was right, that it wasn't my fault. Okay, I hadn't handled it well. But deep down, it wasn't my fault. That's what made the difference."
• "All the same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time a moment like that comes along, there's a part of you that's been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: 'One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels.' So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are peopl..._The first time you glimpse yourself throu..._ It's like walking past a mirror you've w...

• Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

--

• "I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone on a pillar -- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there. "

• The White Book by Han Kang (as translated by Deborah Smith)

--

• "At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd. A sealed chamber carrying all the memories of the life I have lived, and the mother tongue from which they are inseparable. The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight."
• "he who had shipwrecked himself in an alley, who had pushed himself up on cold-numbed hands, thinking of what his life has been, of the loneliness that waits for him at home, thinking what is this, what the hell is this damned dirty white falling snow."
• "Sparse flakes fly in all directions. In ...

• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

--

• "And all this blood for nothing."
• "Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all."
• "The horizon blinks, and morning yawns above it."
• "They lived their lives as sacrifices."
• "It is often my duty to fall in love convincingly."
• "To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am."
• "And everyone is alive, somewhere in time."
• "So in this letter I am yours."
• "She planned to get to it one day; she plans to get to everything one day."
• "Letters are structures, not events. Your...

• under this section you can find quotes from non-fiction

• 12 Birds to Save Your Life: Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett

--

• "Lend me not to another and I will be a quiet companion in all your wanderings. Wherever thou goest there go I, through the eagle's air and over the wide seas; through heat and cold, calm and tempest, and the changing years. When thou layest thyself down upon thy bed when the weary day is over read of me a little and thy dreams shall be sweet." (Isaak Walton)
• "Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words; And let me learn your secret from the sky" (Siegfried Sassoon)
• "Some days, when the shadow of the black dog grows particularly large, because it still does, I will wander up the side of a nearby hill and simply lie down in the grass. If I'm lucky, the skylarks will be...

• There's Something In the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities by Ingrid R.G. Waldron

--

• "If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W.E.B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification. (Murakawa)"
• "Black feminists have long argued that race, gender, class, and other social identities cannot be separated because they function interdependently and accompany an individual into every interaction or experience. In other words, challenging monolithic conceptions of communities requires an understanding of how these multiple s..._in_ and through one another to produce diverse experienc...

• White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind by Koa Beck

--

• "Like a lot of oppressive precepts, white feminism is a belief system more so than being about any one person, white, female, or otherwise. It's a specific way of viewing gender equality that is anchored in the accumulation of individual power rather than the redistribution of it. It can be practiced by anyone, of any race, background, allegiance, identity, or affiliation. White feminism is a state of mind. It's a type of feminism that takes up the politics of power without questioning them — by replicating patterns of white supremacy, capitalistic greed, corporate ascension, inhumane labor practices, and exploitation, and deeming it empowering f...

• Humankind by Rutger Bregman, as translated from the Dutch by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore.

--

• "What is truth? Some things are true whether you believe in them or not."
• "-- ideas are never merely ideas. We are what we believe. We find what we go looking for. And what we predict, comes to pass."
• "Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right."
• "In a weird way, to believe in our own sinful nature is comforting. It provides a kind of absolution. Because if most people are bad, then engagement and resistance aren't worth the effort."
• "The thing we all need to remember -- is that those other folks are a lot like us. -- every one of them is a human being of...

• A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

--

• "That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best."
• "My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares ardently that it come, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the cold black pre-dawn and kneel shivering by the hearth making a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling splits I have laid on the ashes, and I must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs. Such faith, I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains."
• "I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have."

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

--

• "As unpredictable as life may be, we have even less control over the stories they tell about us after we're gone."
• "A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears."
• "Leave this place better than you found it."
• "The land knows you, even when you are lost."
• "A bay is a noun only if water is dead."
• "This was an ache for which the woods had no medicine."
• "The difficulty of digging is an importan...

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

--

• "Many grains of incense on the same altar. One falls to ash first, another later: no difference."
• "There is a river of creation, and time is a violent stream. As soon as one thing comes into sight, it is swept past and another is carried down: it too will be taken on its way."
• "Disgraceful if, in this life where your body does not fail, your soul should fail you first."
• "Sober up, recall yourself, shake off sleep once more: realize they were mere dreams that troubled you, and now that you are awake again look on these things as you would have looked on a dream."
• "All things come from that other world, taking their start from that universal gov...

• Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

--

• "Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world." — Saint Francis of Assisi

--

• "A mycelial network is a map of a fungus's recent history, and is a helpful reminder that all life forms are in fact processes , not things . The 'you' of five years ago was made from different stuff than the 'you' of today. Nature is an event that never stops."

• Tsurezuregusa by Yoshida Kenkō

--

• "What a weakly thing is this heart of ours."
• "So everything is grief until at length the green leaves come."
• "There is no such quiet bliss as to wander in secluded spots where grass is green and water is clear."
• "Truly the beauty of life is its uncertainty. Of all living things, none lives so long as man. Consider how the ephemera awaits the fall of evening, and the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. Even a year of life lived peacefully seems long and happy beyond compare; but for such as never weary of this world and are loth to die, a thousand years would pass away like the dream of a single night."
• "A certain recluse, I know not who, once ...

• American Originality, Essays on poetry by Louise Glück

--

• "I keep thinking it suits Rilke exactly that Paula Becker died; dead she is his creature, a mirror of, or adjunct of, the self. -- I cannot help but feel that Paula Becker is far more eagerly admitted into the poet's soul dead than she would have been alive: alive she was volatile, unreliable, separate in her will. -- And when Rilke, in the famous lines, urges, 'we need, in love, to practice only this: / letting each other go. For holding on / comes easily; we do not need to learn it,' I cannot help but believe that, for Rilke, letting go was in fact remarkably easy, that holding on, whatever might force engagement with the unmanageable other, was alien."

• Gathering Moss - A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

--

• "It is a sign of respect to call a being by its name, and a sign of disrespect to ignore it."
• "I, too, can have a covenant with change, a pledge to let go, laying aside resistance for the promise of becoming."
• "There was something strangely familiar about the quality of the light; leafy, wet, and saturated with green."
• "In a display case, a thing becomes only a facsimile of itself."
• "I wonder if it's a kind of homesickness."
• "But I think I cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the posses...

• Upstream by Mary Oliver

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• "If this was lost, let us all be lost always."
• "Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. / Attention is the beginning of devotion."
• "But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple — or a green field — a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing — an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness — wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just t...

• Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

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• "This is a borrowed house that we're talking in. It's not my home. / We sit at the table and I don't know where to begin. / I don't know anything about you. / It is hard to ask questions. / You want me to ask questions, because you say it is easier to answer questions than tell your story. I don't want to ask questions, because I think of all the questions you must have been asked before."
• "You say, It was the worst feeling. Then you say it again. The worst feeling. / Several times, you tell me, I see my death. / Then you say it again. I see my death. / The hardest things, I realise, you are saying them all twice."
• "What can a new year mean, when you are young and all you are able to do is wait?"...