It Is Raining, Without Meaning To. The Way Sometimes You Hurt Someone, Also Without Meaning To.

It is raining, without meaning to. The way sometimes you hurt someone, also without meaning to.

Gemma Gorga, from “16,” transl. Sharon Dolin, Book of Minutes (Oberlin College Press, 2019)

“There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met [her]. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.”

C. S. Lewis, from A Grief Observed (Faber and Faber, 1961)

“The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio […] in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind. The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life. And unlike paintings, sculptures or passages of great music, they do not outstrip the scope of memory, but are the actual thing, incarnate.”

— Clive James, ‘The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life,’ The Guardian (26 September 2020)

But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.

Rachel Cusk, from Outline (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)

“You, who opened suns in my heart,”

— Alfonsina Storni, tr. by David Masse, from Mask & Clover: Poems; “The Siren, (via violentwavesofemotion)

buffleheadcabin:

“It was one of those moments that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic … Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”

— Rachel Cusk, from Outline (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)