David D

“you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write”
― W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems

“Hers was not an easy sleep. Through her dreams there came and went the young girls of her mother’s stories: girls who had left their little houses against the rules and custom. Some of them were bitten by snakes and died at once; some of them lived long enough to bring shame and sorrow to their families, and then died; and there was the one who cut herself and sucked her own blood and liked the taste so much, she ate more and more of herself, becoming nothing but a head—a Cannibal Head—which devoured her parents and her brothers and sisters and then rolled horribly over the earth with an insatiable need always to eat human flesh, more and more and more.”
― Theodora Kroeber, The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from California Indian Legends

“There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“but happiness has a shape made of air / it was never owned by anyone / it comes when it will in its own time — W.S. Merwin, from “December Morning,” Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)”
― W.S. Merwin, Garden Time