Michael Kurrier

“This is what the writer craves, in a café in the earliest hours, in an empty drawing room of a hotel, or scrawling in notebook in the pew of a silent cathedral. A sudden shaft of brightness containing the vibration of a particular moment. . . . The unsullied memory of unpremediated gestures of kindness. These are the bread of angels.”
― Patti Smith, Bread of Angels: A Memoir

“There were the images, all around them.

Those images would be on the phone that woke them up. An astronaut singing in outer space. A girl riding a wrecking ball. They would light up their pillows as they roused from sleep, and parade, one after another, beneath their fingertips while they used the bathroom. They would be there in the kitchen on the tablet as Anna and Tom waited for their coffee to brew, then reappear seamlessly on their monitors in the home office. A jealous husband’s threats graffitied across the front of a house. Goats teetering on a cliffside or at the edge of a highway overpass. Whenever they went out for lunch, the images would shrink to the size of the rectangular screen and hover, midair, a foot above their plates. A tornado of sharks in the sky. While they waited for the U8 or the M29. While they took a piss. A famous woman spraying an arc of champagne backwards over her head into a wineglass balanced on her tailbone. Those images lit up their faces in the dark bedroom when they went to set the alarm. The faces of strangers. The faces of handsome criminals. Avocado slices.”
― Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection

“Our days are open and transparent, but enveloped too by the faintest membrane of time, almost imperceptible when our gaze passes through it to consider a single day on its own. But come another day, and another after that, the membrane will thicken, that which before was as clear as day will then be blurred and faintly obscured; come yet more and only the outlines will be perceptible, until they too recede and dissolve, and what happened inside them will then be hidden from us, sealed away by time.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, The School of Night

“It’s a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word