Jacek

“He took the cigar out of his mouth and said, "Those people had God in their hearts."
I said to him in a whisper, "God exists now too."
"But not within us," he said.
I said to him: "A certain hasidic master was asked where the Holy One, blessed be He, dwells. He told them: Wherever He is allowed to enter, there He dwells.”
― S.Y. Agnon, A Book that Was Lost: and Other Stories

“I sat silent before the book, and the book unsealed its lips and revealed to me things I had never heard before. When I was tired of studying I thought many thoughts, and this is one of them: Many generations ago a wise man wrote a book and he did not know of this man who sits here, but in the end all his words prove to be meant for him.”
― S.Y. Agnon, A Guest for the Night

“The moonlight returned and brightened. The Dead Sea shone like a barrel of oil, sparks of light shot out from it illuminating the mountainsides, and from the mountains one could see bonfires. Since I was sad, I thought of things that make one even sadder.”
― S.Y. Agnon, The Outcast & Other Tales

“The poet Gary Snyder’s finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child’s room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist’s personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn’t an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It’s a new thing, a new whole. It’s made up.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination