Quotes from favorite writers

“But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing, or in the actual painting, you are filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work.”

Annie Dillard

“On the surface, there is no distinction between our experiences - some are vivid, others opaque; some are pleasant, others cause agony upon recollection – but there is no way of knowing which are dreams and which are reality.”

Silvina Ocampo

“I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.” Hermann Hesse

And then, there is the first verse of this Lorca poem, which I include because of the evocative power it holds for me and has always held for me. Because there is no way to understand these lines with your logical mind, you must understand them with your blood, with your crying lonely lost heart. You must understand them with a bitter taste in your mouth, the bitter taste of death; now that you are dying and your longing will never be quenched:

“Green, how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches. The ship out on the sea and the horse on the mountain. With the shade around her waist she dreams on her balcony, green flesh, her hair green, with eyes of cold silver. Green, how I want you green. Under the gypsy moon, all things are watching her and she cannot see them.”

Federico Garcia Lorca (from Romance Sonámbulo)

ee cummings

since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world

my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis