April 2012
2 posts
I have misused my life, but if the dead forgive, then it is certainly on the condition that we forever refrain from evil and repair all we have done wrong. Can that be?…
- Gerard de Nerval
March 2012
20 posts
We do not know what happens to life’s sorrows after death, especially those last moments of suffering, it is possible that everything ends with death, but we cannot be certain that the memory of suffering does not linger for several hours in this body we describe as dead, nor can we rule out the possibility that matter uses putrefaction as a last resort to rid itself of suffering.
-...
Peace? There never was any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.
- Harold Brodkey
Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave.
- Joseph Hall
The rest is silence.
- William Shakespeare
By now she’d begun to forget that inside of her were two souls, and these souls kept quiet and cried without tears in the dark prison of her body. In their place inside there grew inside her a whole new soul. It’s no secret, of course, that souls sometimes die with a person and are replaced by others.
- Janet Frame
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
- Margaret Atwood
The rain comes from heaven, and we are cleansed by it. Suddenly the meaning of baptism is clear to me: you can begin again, and we are saved every day.
- Gary Young
How do I know that the dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life?
- Chuang Tzu
You are an impression, and not at all the thing you appear to be…
- Epictetus
The dream is the thought that wasn’t thought when it should have been, and now it haunts me night after night and I can’t forget it.
- José Saramago
October 2010
4 posts
The light from the proper direction, a house lit up by it - then the person will recognize this place. But everything that came before, and after, and why this place, and why this light, this house, this wind
- Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Distance looks our way; the godwits vanish towards another summer and no one knows where he will lie down at night.
- Janet Frame
July 2010
3 posts
Someday, the bird calls from its leafless tree very far away, in the land where there is no sun and no moon, I will be back, and then you will find me merciful.
- Margaret Atwood
February 2010
10 posts
Hymeneal still it lay, the thing so soon to be changed, between me and all the forgotten horrors of joy.
- Samuel Beckett
Give me an example of space: My two hands [held together] as one.
- The Mahabharata
So scream and bleed your way along the road,
Until your lungs, heart, and veins are empty
Of grief, and deny your father’s ghost
His last chance to be your warrior-thief.
- Sherman Alexie
Above our saddle come to rest Toes hang from the branch A horse that waits for a rider’s death Never keep riding.
- W. Oldham, Stable Will
Who is like You, O Lord, among the silent, remaining silent through the suffering of His children?
- Nelly Sachs
August 2009
4 posts
She had learned long ago that gentle smiles were vanity only, not blessings or forgiveness… the person best suited to smile a gentle smile was a madman.
- Janet Frame, The Adaptable Man
It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.
- Harold Brodkey
