Quotes

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

The world itself seemed ephemeral, glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable; the idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.

Like it or not, you have been entered into a state of sacred volatility. Whatever you thought you possessed — love, security, a picture of the future, a sense of being lovable — is shaken loose from its appearance, rendered momentarily formless through the fire of heartbreak. Now, depending on your approach, you can attempt to squelch this process and retain possession of whatever old beliefs you have left — or, through the grace of your attention and acceptance, you can open the door wide, let some air in, and watch the flames grow.

If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, but in your innermost consciousness, wakefulness and knowing.

I used to think of love as a visceral experience, something that envelops you because of the way another person makes you feel. In love, I found courage, a willingness to race forward into new places, new experiences, new risks. The world became large for me when romantic love became real, perhaps because I myself felt full with new capacities for thought and need and feeling. I wasn’t alone. The annals of popular music, archives of cinema and a great parcel of the canon of enduring literature concern themselves with love between two people. But now, because I am a parent, perhaps, I am striving for the courage and the skill to embody another manner of love. I find myself asking what might happen if, without asking anything of you in return, I were to choose to see you, whoever you are, as another version of myself, one worthy of my acknowledgment, my concern, my devotion?

Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Time is like a wasteland. It has grandeur but no beauty. Its strange, frightful power is always feared but rarely cheered. Then we arrive at the seventh day, and the Sabbath is endowed with a felicity which enraptures the soul, which glides into our thoughts with a healing sympathy. It is a day on which hours do not oust one another.

You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.

Have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.

I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.

…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

As the days went by, the evolution of like into love was accelerated. White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though in his consciousness he knew not what love was. It manifested itself to him as a void in his being — a hungry, aching, yearning void that clamoured to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the new god’s presence. At such times love was joy to him, a wild, keen-thrilling satisfaction. But when away from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void in him sprang up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.

One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”

Like it or not, you have been entered into a state of sacred volatility. Whatever you thought you possessed — love, security, a picture of the future, a sense of being lovable — is shaken loose from its appearance, rendered momentarily formless through the fire of heartbreak. Now, depending on your approach, you can attempt to squelch this process and retain possession of whatever old beliefs you have left — or, through the grace of your attention and acceptance, you can open the door wide, let some air in, and watch the flames grow.

Profoundly inspired human beings have peered into the question of existence since the inception of recorded history. Human genius has propounded philosophies and mystical geometries — but the question, as far as most people are concerned, remains unanswered. It cannot be said that there must be an answer. Neither can we say that there is no answer. All we can say is that we want to know, because being in and of the world is a sticky question. Sometimes the stickiness of the world is very sweet; it is like honey on the razor’s edge. You lick the blade and “Oh! how very sweet it is!” Then there is the sharpness, and the blood. Some people would say, “Honey is a wicked and treacherous thing. It is best avoided if you want to avoid being cut.” This way of thinking sees the razor’s edge of life as undesirable. Some people would say, “Why not find a way of tasting the honey without getting cut?” This is another way of thinking that also sees the razor’s edge of life as undesirable. Some people would say, “The razor’s edge is all there is — nothing but pain; therefore extinction is release.” This way of thinking denies the sweetness of the honey. Some people would say, “The honey is all that really matters; if you’re cut by the razor’s edge then at least you will have tasted the sweetness!” This way of thinking accepts both the honey and the razor’s edge but divides the experience. But the honey and the razor’s edge are a single experience. If you manifest a human form, you taste the honey on the razor’s edge. If you live for the honey and see the razor’s edge as an occupational hazard, either your experience of the honey becomes too sickly sweet and makes you vomit or you lacerate yourself on the blade. What is it to taste the honey on the razor’s edge? Is it to reject the experience of either or both in favor of seeking an answer in nonexistence? Or is it to accept the unified experience as being what is, and thus to be liberated from duality?