“So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.”
― Just Kids
― Just Kids
“Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”
― Just Kids
― Just Kids
“It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).”
― Just Kids
― Just Kids
“Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced. At the factory where I had labored with a hard-edged, illiterate group of women, I was harassed in his name. Suspecting me of being a Communist for reading a book in a foreign language, they threatened me in the john, prodding me to denounce him. It was within this atmosphere that I seethed. It was for him that I wrote and dreamed. He became my archangel, delivering me from the mundane horrors of factory life. His hands had chiseled a manual of heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge of him added swagger to my step and this could not be stripped away. I tossed my copy of Illuminations in a plaid suitcase. We would escape together.”
― Just Kids
― Just Kids
Renee’s 2025 Year in Books
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