House of Fortitude

- Frances Hodgson Burnett / The Secret Garden

"In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century w...

- Anthony Burgess / A Dead Man in Deptford

"- Does he not also tell some legend of a unity capriciously split by the gods, so that half goes wandering in search of half? But that is a pretty doctrine of male soul and female soul conjoined if they are lucky, which is rare, after an eternity of seeking.

- Male and female are grossly conjoined following nature’s wish that they breed. There is an airier or more spiritual mode of conjunction.

They drank and drinking looked each other in the eye or eyes. Thomas Walsingham said:

- Well, we have known each other some t...

- Jenny Holzer / Arno (text engraved on a pair of white marble benches)

"I WALK IN
I SEE YOU
I WATCH YOU
I SCAN YOU
I WAIT FOR YOU
I TICKLE YOU
I TEASE YOU
I SEARCH YOU
I BREATHE YOU
I TALK 
I SMILE
I TOUCH YOUR HAIR
YOU ARE THE ONE
YOU ARE THE ONE WHO DID THIS TO ME
YOU ARE MY OWN

I SHOW YOU
I FEEL YOU 
I ASK YOU
I DON’T ASK
I WON’T ASK YOU
I CAN’T TELL YOU
I LIE

I AM CRYING HARD
THERE WAS BLOOD
NO ONE TOLD ME
NO ONE KNEW
MY MOTHER KNOWS

I FORGET YOUR NAME
I DON’T THINK
I BURY MY HEAD
I BURY YOU<...

- Maggie Nelson / Bluets

"1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.

2. And so I fell in love with a color - in this case, the color blue - as if falling under a spell...

- Fyodor Dostoevsky / The Brothers Karamazov

Part II.
Book VI: The Russian Monk
Chapter 3: Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zossima. The Russian Monk and his possible Significance.

FATHERS and teachers, what is the monk? In the cultivated world the word is nowadays pronounced by some people with a jeer, and by others it is used as a term of abuse, and this contempt for the monk is growing. It is true, alas, it is true, that there are many sluggards, gluttons, profligates, and insolent beggars among monks. Educated people point to these: "You are idlers, useless memb...

- Madeline Miller / Circe

“I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accid...

- Umberto Eco / Foucault's Pendulum

"That was when I saw the Pendulum.

The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.

I knew--but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing--that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by π, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined...

- Margaret Atwood / Selected Poems 2: 1976 - 1986

“Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head.

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one<...

- Wendell Berry / Given

“How to be a Poet

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity…

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is ...

- Janet Fitch / White Oleander

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”

- Olga Tokarczuk / Primeval and Other Times

“The Time of the Lime Trees

There are lime trees lining the Highway leading from Jeszkotle to the Kielce road. They looked the same at the beginning, and they will look the same at the end. They have thick trunks and roots that reach deep into the earth, where they meet the foundations of everything that lives. In winter their mighty boughs cast sharp shadows onto the snow and measure the hours of the short day. In spring the lime trees put out millions of green leaves that bring sunlight down to the earth. In summer their fragrant ...

- Fyodor Dostoevsky / The Brothers Karamazov

Part I.
Book II: An Unfortunate Gathering
Chapter 2: The Old Buffoon

THEY entered the room almost at the same moment that the elder came in from his bedroom. There were already in the cell, awaiting the elder, two monks of the hermitage, one the Father Librarian, and the other Father Paissy, a very learned man, so they said, in delicate health, though not old. There was also a tall young man, who looked about two and twenty, standing in the corner throughout the interview. He had a broad, fresh face, and clever, observant, narrow...

- Sylvia Plath / Mirror

"I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to tho...

- Søren Kierkegaard / The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air 

"What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself; but truly to be present to oneself is this “today,” this to be today, truly to be today. And the truer it is that you are today, the more you are entirely present to yourself in being today, the less does tomorrow, the day of misfortune, exist for you. Joy is the present time, with the entire emphasis falling on the present time. Therefore God is blessed, he who eternally says: “Tod...

- Ray Bradbury / Zen in the Art of Writing

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wis...

- Sally Mann / Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

“As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as the well. And I see them at the same time, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and bett...

- Italo Calvino / If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category ...

- John Banville / The Untouchable

"Boy. I miss him, despite everything. Oh, I know, he was a clown, cruel, dishonest, slovenly, careless of himself and others, but for all that he maintained a curious kind of—what shall I call it?—a kind of grace. Yes, a kind of splendourous grace, it is not too much to say. When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences moving in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my frien...

-Farid al-Din 'Attar / The Conference of the Birds

"Moths gathered in a fluttering throng one night
To learn the truth about the candle light,
And they decided one of them should go
To gather news of the elusive glow.
One flew till in the distance he discerned
A palace window where a candle burned —
And went no nearer: back again he flew
To tell the others what he thought he knew.
The mentor of the moths dismissed his claim,
Remarking: “He knows nothing of the flame.”
A moth more eager than the one before
Set out and passed beyond the palace door.
He...

- Franz Kafka / A Hunger Artist

"During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now. At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day; there were people who bought season tickets for the last few days and sat from morning till night in front of his small barred ...

- Vladimir Nabokov / Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

"Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood's dawns. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day. Take over, dear, for a little while. Pill, pillow, billow, billions. Go on from here, Ada, please.

(She). Billions ...

- Gerald Murnane / Border Districts

“I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine … I was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being. I preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each...

- Olga Tokarczuk / Primeval and Other Times

“It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don’t know “where” God is – and people sometimes ask such questions – you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus develop...

- Jenny Hval / Girls against God (translated by Marjam Idriss)

"The word BAND is quite similar to the word BOND. Have you thought about that? A band is a bond between people. A band can emerge unexpectedly, when you talk or suddenly say the same things, or mention the same references. You harmonize in conversation, create rhythm. That’s the beginning. We can dive into that beat; the beat is more alive than we are. Our hearts might stop beating in the end, but the pulse of that heartbeat will continue to symbolize time, breath, life, even after we’re gone. It’s that simple. All we can do to feel al...

- Ben Okri / Astonishing the Gods

“Are you comfortable? Are you all right? Is the wind too cold for you? Should I go and fetch you some more fruits? I love your silence. It is so wise. It listens. It invites warmth. I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you. You have the loneliness that all true heroes have, a loneliness that is a deep sea, within which the fishes of mystery dwell. I love your quest. It is noble. It has greatness in it. Only one who is born under a blessed star would set sail across the billowing waves and the wild squa...

- Rainer Maria Rilke / Letters to a Young Poet / Letter 4

"Worpswede, near Bremen

    July 16, 1903

     About ten days ago I left Paris, tired and quite sick, and traveled to this great northern plain, whose vastness and silence and sky ought to make me well again. But I arrived during a long period of rain; this is the first day it has begun to let up over the restlessly blowing landscape, and I am taking advantage of this moment of brightness to greet you, dear Sir.

     My dear Mr. Kappus: I have left a l...

- Rainer Maria Rilke / Letters to a Young Poet / Letter 1

"Paris
February 17, 1903

Dear Sir,

Your letter arrived just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great confidence you have placed in me. That is all I can do. I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has...

- Jon Fosse / Scenes from a Childhood

IT’S MAYBE FOUR O’CLOCK

It’s maybe four o’clock when Trygve and I go out to the old barn. My grandfather built this barn but now it’s falling apart, the unpainted planks in the walls are rotting away, there are holes in the wall you can see through in some places and a couple of roof tiles lying in the nettles, three more sticking out of a puddle of mud. A rusty hook is hanging from the door-frame. The door is hanging from the door-frame too, attached with hay-baling cord, swinging crookedly. A warm summer d...

- Olga Tokarczuk / Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Sparks come from the very source of light and are made of the purest brightness—so say the oldest legends. When a human Being is to be born, a spark begins to fall. First it flies through the darkness of outer space, then through galaxies, and finally, before it falls here, to Earth, the poor thing bumps into the orbits of planets. Each of them contaminates the spark with some Properties, while it darkens and fades. First Pluto draws the frame for this cosmic experiment and reveals its basic principles—life is a fleeting incident, fol...

- Janet Fitch / White Oleander

“But then I realized, they weren't calling out for their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers, purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in it for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women wh...