We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

 - Charles Bukowski

 

*always relevant 

 One day, some fragrance will issue from my being and I will flower.

Institute Benjamenta (1995)

“Children you are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!“

 - Utah Phillips

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. 

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

— Mary Oliver

I used to think I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I've lost.

- Nan Goldin 

 

If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes. If we opened me up, we'd find beaches. - Agnes Verda

I would rather be faithful to my future than to my past, if it becomes a matter of choice.

― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I know the stars by their names,

Aldebaran, Altair,

And I know the path they take

Up heaven's broad blue stair.

I know the secrets of men

By the look of their eyes,

Their gray thoughts, their strange thoughts

Have made me sad and wise. 

- Sara Teasdale

“I am something supernatural not exactly god, ghost, spirit, angel, principle or element – There is no term for it in English.”

 - Anne Carson

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along. 

- Willam Stafford

“Why does the sea hold what it loves most below?"

 Alex Dimitrov

One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know the miseries which afflict this world.

- Lorraine Hansberry 

I am too static to feel quite natural on the Milky Way.

- Helen Keller in letter about her experience going up top to the Empire State building 

He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, wasted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it. 

Ursula K. Le Guin

 

film still from 'The Great Beauty"

"This storm is what we call progress."

 The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 

Walter Benjamin

Life is just the shipwreck of our plans - The Shape of Water