Lisa

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr asks the survivor’s questions about violence: How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared?—questions that can initiate in a writer the quest for meaning and purpose. “But this quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” he writes. “First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation.” He is referring to Lorca’s idea of duende: a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote: “In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“The whole business of smoking is like forcing yourself to wear tight shoes just to get the pleasure of taking them off.”
― Allen Carr, The Easyway to Stop Smoking

“At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.”
― Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers