Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep.
quotations
from Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway
“Tommy,” Willie said. “I love you, you son of a bitch, and don’t die.”
Thomas Hudson looked at him without moving his head.
“Try to understand if it isn’t too hard.”
Thomas Hudson looked at him. He felt far away now and there were no problems at all. He felt the ship gathering her speed and the lovely throb of her engines against his shoulder blades which rested against the boards. He looked up and there was the sky that he had always loved and he looked across the great lagoon that he was quite sure, now, he would never paint and he eased his position a little to lessen the pain. The engines were around three thousand now, he thought, and they came through the deck and into him.
“I think I understand, Willie,” he said.
“Oh shit,” Willie said. “You never understand anybody that loves you.”
Coming or Going: a koan by Dogen
The migrating bird
leaves no trace behind
and does not need a guide.
translated by Robert Bly
from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin
from Aristotle
What soon grows old? Gratitude.
on men & women 2: following a second conversation with B
“All men are liable to error, and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation.”
John Locke
“Woman’s at best a contradiction still.”
Alexander Pope
on friendship by Thomas Moore
“What though youth gave love and roses,
Age still leaves us friends and wine.”
on men & women: following a conversation with B
“Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest buds.
All men make faults”
William Shakespeare
“In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.”
Stendhal
from When The Day Comes by Ghalib
Love requires waiting, but desire doesn’t want to wait.
The heart has no patience; it would rather bleed to death.
I know you’ll respond when you understand the state of my soul,
But I’ll probably be earth before all that is clear to you.
translated by Robert Bly
Maxim Gorky on books
Books enshrouded the whole world in a mournful aspiration towards better things, and each one of them seemed a soul tacked down to paper by characters and words which came to life the moment my eyes and my mind came into contact with them.
Leonard Durso 