The Shadow Of A Thing Doesnt Exist Without The Original To Cast It. A Dry Bed Was Still Once A River.

“The shadow of a thing doesn’t exist without the original to cast it. A dry bed was still once a river. A bell unrung is still a bell.”

— Jodi Picoult, from The Book of Two Ways (Ballantine, 2020)

“Your blood clotting / neurons firing / heart always beating and beating. Your own hands falling out to catch you before you hit the ground. All the ways you save yourself even when you don’t want to.”

— Darshana Suresh, “Love is,” from Howling at the Moon

edwordsmyth:

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving. Of there being someone who loves and desires you, and he glories in his love and desire, and you glory in this ever-strange being, which comes up against you, and disappears, again and again, surprising you with difficulties and with bounty. To lose this is the greatest loss, a loss for which there is no consolation.

— Gillian Rose, from Love’s Work (NYRB Classics, 2011)

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)

Luke

I had a dog who loved flowers. Briskly she went through the fields, yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head and her wet nose touching the face of every one with its petals of silk with its fragrance rising into the air where the bees, their bodies heavy with pollen hovered— and easily she adored every blossom not in the serious careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom— the way we praise or don’t praise— the way we love or don’t love— but the way we long to be— that happy in the heaven of earth— that wild, that loving.

“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)