Sunday, April 1, 2012

From the mouths of others

Today, this week, I have no words: ironic, perhaps, given that Losing It was officially released on Wednesday.  So instead I am gathering the words for you, that you might find a pattern you like among them.

1.  since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves;
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom ...
e e cummings

2.  I am over-run, jungled in my bed, I am infested with a menagerie of desires: my heart is eaten by a dove, a cat scrambles in the cave of my sex, hounds in my head obey a whipmaster who cries nothing but havoc as the hours test my endurance with an accumulation of tortures.  Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?

How can I be kind?  How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day?  Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape.
Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept


3.  chaos, n: The wrongs are always more visible, the threats always closing in when in truth the world opens and opens and opens.
David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

4,  Neither she nor James had ever uttered the word 'love'.  Both were too shy.  Both were troubled by what might dissolve if they dared to name it.  Neither wished to alarm the other, or to reach and find their hands empty.
Gail Jones, Five Bells

5.  But no one succumbs to a temptation they find unattractive.  What is it, this compulsion to scrawl things on blank pages?  Why this boundless outflowing of words?  What drives us to it? Is writing some sort of disease, or - being speech in visual form - is it simply a manifestation of being human?
Margaret Atwood, Curious Pursuits

2 comments:

  1. Sometimes when words fail, it's nice to let other writers speak for us.

    Funnily enough, I just finished Bye, Beautiful today, and loved it.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Elimy, and I just read your wonderful and thoughtful review. Much appreciated!

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