December 2011
33 posts
“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever — there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
—John Irving (via atomos)
“Inherent in human nature is the quest for certainty and the sense of security that is its reward. So there is always going to be a clash between the evolving self’s aspiration for certainty and the necessity to relinquish that need in order to be able to keep moving up to higher stages without ever halting one’s vertical development. The authentic self is the expression of the evolutionary imperative itself, within the human heart and mind. It is a perpetual, unending, and always ecstatic impulse in consciousness that strives only to create the future. But in order for the authentic self to function uninhibitedly, the individual has to be willing to continually let go and embrace ever more of the world of form in every moment. It’s only a rare individual who actually is going to have the courage, the authenticity of interest, the fearlessness, and the liberated awareness to be able and willing to continually let go in that way and at the same time have his or her own deepest sense of confidence in the nature of being and in life remain absolutely unthreatened. What I am saying is that it’s possible to be deeply certain, to have the absolute conviction that is the hallmark of enlightened awareness, together with a profoundly open and vertically aspiring self-sense or evolutionary impulse. At an existential level one can be absolutely convinced and still be vertically reaching, groping, learning, inquiring, and growing eternally.”
—Andrew Cohen (via daytripped)
“And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood. That was just as well. The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning — and, once decided, best unseen.”
—Tom Clancy (via atomos)
“Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around it, put the date that you’re doing the copying out, and then copy it out. You’ll find that you just soak into that prose, and you’ll find that the comma means something, that it’s there for a reason, and that that adjective is there for a reason, because the copying out, the handwriting, the becoming an apprentice—or in a way, a servant—to that passage in the book makes you see things in it that you wouldn’t see if you just moved your eyes over it, or even if you typed it. If your verbal mind isn’t working, then stop trying to make it work by pushing, and instead, open that spiral notebook, find a book that you like, and copy out a couple paragraphs.”
—Nicholson Baker on copying out passages of your favorite books by hand (via austinkleon)
“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”
—Willa Cather (via thoughtsdetained)
