Once a baby lizard loved me so completely,
he moved into my apartment and died of hunger.

-Matthew Dickman

when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is particularly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality toward him, even when I feel that I ought to.

-George Orwell

a softer world

[I keep re-remembering the last question. Going through the 'a softer world' archives is one of my Most Favorite Things]

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We made a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

-Wallace Stevens

[the final two lines kill my soul (for laughter and beauty)]

The artist's work is homeless in the deepest sense

-Barth

As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

-Robinson Jeffers

blog title: Surviving INFP

hmph.

Possible Career Paths for the INFP:

• Writers
• Counselors / Social Workers
• Teachers / Professors
• Psychologists
• Psychiatrists
• Musicians
• Clergy / Religious Workers
  
  [each of these I have seriously considered at some point]
  

INFPs do not like to deal with hard facts and logic. Their focus on their feelings and the Human Condition makes it difficult for them to deal with impersonal judgment. They don't understand or believe in the validity of impersonal judgment, which makes them naturally rather ineffective at using it. Most INFPs will avoid impersonal analysis, although some have developed this ability and are able to be quite logical. Under stress, it's not uncommon for INFPs to mis-use hard logic in the heat of anger, throwing out fact after (often inaccurate) fact in an emotional outburst.

[here]

How Google street view really works

[via ayjay]

Children's Bedtime Stories by Gordon Dioxide

A lot of time you confuse the personality with the piece of work. Ultimately it doesn't do anybody any favours - it negates the work as well. What can happen essentially if you're an artist like Rothko and you chose to kill yourself, that colours the work forever more, which is totally not the point and it destroys the work. There's a Rothko room in the Tate Gallery in London, when kids go in there they go, "Wow, this is great!" and all they see is the colour and the joy of the paintings. And all the adults see is this poor sod that killed himself.

-Thom Yorke

Lines on Retirement, After Reading 'Lear'

for Richard Pacholski

Avoid storms. And retirement parties.
You can’t trust the sweetnesses your friends will
offer, when they really want your office,
which they’ll redecorate. Beware the still
untested pension plan. Keep your keys. Ask
for more troops than you think you’ll need. Listen
more to fools and less to colleagues. Love your
youngest child the most, regardless. Back to
storms: dress warm, take a friend, don’t eat the grass,
don’t stand near tall trees, and keep the yelling
down—the winds won’t listen, and no one will
see you in the dark. It’s too hard to hear
you over all the thunder. But you’re not
Lear, except that we can’t stop you from what
you’ve planned to do. In the end, no one leaves
the stage in character—we never see
the feather, the mirror held to our lips.
So don’t wait for skies to crack with sun. Feel
the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,
the strange, sore comforts of the wind. Embrace
your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.
Go ahead, take it off, take it all off.
Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers
into your hair. Bellow at cataracts.
If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as
if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold
beer. So much better than making theories.
We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.

-David Wright

I don’t mean to make any comparisons, except that there are cliffs of fall in all of us, right? Is that Hopkins, cliffs of fall? I think it is. Beautiful phrase. I think we have our own precipices inside, and whatever we do to skirt them, or postpone them, they come. We arrive at the edge periodically. So we carry it all around in us, everybody – it’s not easy to live. It’s not easy for any of us to live.

-Kay Ryan

To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully—to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing.

-Henry James

[quoted]

the furthest point in the US you can get away from McDonalds is 107 miles, in South Dakota

I think it’s, in a sense, laughable to say that any poetry is impersonal, because the motive is terribly personal. And if you wind up writing about a cup, there is some personal reason that you’re writing about that, and some personal way that you’re approaching its dimension, or color, or placement in the universe. We can’t hide ourselves. That’s the truth. No poetry, however apparently impersonal, allows us to hide. And if you have hidden, you’ve really failed. I mean, it means that you’ve been opaque. It means that you have perhaps written something that’s already been written. Because, then your words would be hidden directly behind somebody else’s words. They wouldn’t exist independently. There’s no hiding.

-Kay Ryan

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.

.................................................—Walter Savage Landor

[Pinsky discusses]

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.

-W. Benjamin, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History”

LOS ANGELES—Executives at Paramount Pictures announced Monday that production had finally wrapped on The Brothers Karamazov, a new film adaptation that concludes at the precise moment most readers give up on the classic Russian novel.

-relevant to my life right now