Langston

“I don’t know what to do today, help me decide. Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages? Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me after all?
Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down? Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage?
Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self? Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but?
Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, 'Just east of here, the Rockies.' I said, 'Mr. Shulman, the Rockies are west of here.' He did a voilà with his hands, and then said, 'I move mountains.' That stuck with me. Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass."


-Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)”
― David Foster Wallace

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence … Words, strain,
Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets