Mar

“I’m restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh, like barbs. If I can hold so much love within me, and nevertheless continue to be uneasy, it’s because I need God to come. Come, before it’s too late. I’m in danger, as is everyone who’s alive.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won't be held to account - because summer won't be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed.
Not even this one she's in exists. Even though it's apparently the best summer so far of the century. Not even when she's quite literally walking down a road as beautiful and archetypal as this through an actual perfect summer afternoon.
So we mourn it while we're in it.
Look at me walking down a road in summer thinking about the transience of summer.
Even while I'm right at the heart of it I just can't get to the heart of it.”
― Ali Smith, Summer

“It’s an old impulse. To honor the dark with festivals of light, to battle it with same. Days are getting darker as we hurtle into winter, it comes at us faster every year. I am listening to sycamore leaves rustle down the sidewalk in front of my apartment. It’s somewhere in the forties. The wind is strong. Its voice changes this time of year, as though coming from darker lungs, and the leaves are at their loudest, last rattle before long quiet. In his fevered novel Malicroix, Henri Bosco describes this almost-winter moment of the year, “when the world was poised on a pure ridge,” balanced between two seasons, casting “a glance back at the aging autumn, still misty with its wild moods, to contemplate deadly winter from afar.” The misty mood is behind us. We’re looking now at something dark and wilder.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay