• "Pain is also unshareable in that it is resistant to language ... All our interior states of consciousness: emotional, perceptual, cognitive and somatic can be described as having an object in the external world ... This affirms our capacity to move beyond the boundaries of our body into the external, sharable world. This is the space in which we interact and communicate with our environment. But when we explore the interior state of physical pain we find that there is no object "out there"—no external, referential content. Pain is not of, or for, anything. Pain is. And it draws us away from the space of interaction, the sharable world, inwards. It draws us into the boundaries of our body."

-Shirley Spitz

• "A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her."

Oscar Wilde

• I have learned this at least by my experiment: if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. ~ Thoreau
• It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. ~ Thoreau
• Any true feeling cannot in reality be expressed. To do so is to betray it. To express it, however, is to conceal it. True expression conceals what it exhibits. It pits the mind against nature's real vacuum, by creating in reaction a kind of fullness of thought. Or rather it creates a vacuum in thought, in relation to the manifest illusion of nature. Any strong feeling produces an idea of empiness within us, and lucid language which prevents this empitness also prevents poetry appearing in thought. For this reason an image, an allegory, a form disguising what it means to reveal, has more meaning to the mind than the enligtenment brought about by words or their analysis.

Hence true beauty never strikes us directly and the setting sun is beautiful because of everything else we lose by it.

-- antonin artaud

• My whole life

the worst and best of everything I've done

has been the business of someone else.

--laura kasischke

• any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near.

e.e. cummings

• My eldest son rolls over in his sleep

and, like an actor mid-soliloquy, he murmurs, "Nothing --"

then he gives the look he keeps for jokes and happy accidents, the almost-smile that's fading as it happens;

and, fathered by the dark, I'm struck again with wonder, that his dream is almost there to overhear, and how, even in sleep,

he knows he's being just a touch theatrical, a trait he's recognized

in both of us, and finds ridiculous, yet touching:

five years old, he sees more than he knows, but likes the mystery of fondness, and the nothing in his dream

that might be everything he cannot tell and might be what it seems: that private game of making good, and owing no one nothing.

-- john burnside

• my mother, all through my childhood, / when I was saying something to her, something important, would move her lips as I was speaking / so that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words I was saying as I was saying them.

-- c.k. williams

• "Ordinarily, we look at something, and our gaze is like a fine wire or a taut thread with two supports—one being the eye and the other what it sees, and there's some such great support structure for every second that passes; but at this particular second, on the contrary, it is rather as though something painfully sweet were pulling our eye-beams apart."

-Robert Musil

• The Holy Ghost has kissed me.

Far, far off I hear an avalanche. My fingers pierce a jungle. A fig tree is growing in this room.

My chest has gone all pink. My eye is black. A peacock's tail is growing out of me.

-Salamun

• A man in his life has no time to have

Time for everything. He has no room to have room For every desire. Ecclesiastes was wrong to claim that.

His soul is knowing And very professional, Only his body remains an amateur Always. It tries and fumbles. He doesn't learn and gets confused, Drunk and blind in his pleasures and pains.

The leaves dry out on the ground, And the naked branches point To the place where there is time for everything.

-- yehuda amichai

• Because you open a door

doesn't mean there has to be a room because there are windows doesn't mean there's an interior doesn't mean there's space

-- ryuichi tamura

• Some people gladly believe that there is no divine providence in charge of human affairs. They put their bodies and their souls at the mercy of chance and give themselves up to be beaten and mangled by inordinate desires.

-Augustine; On Free Choice of the Will

• I go around some street corners

and have an idea in my head as clear as a picture.

I like the cut-out I'm moving around in, slowly, toward change.

Some things just wait for me to stop defending myself.

-- Kark Krolow