David Broussard Broussard

“Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves
from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be,
in its flight, something more than itself?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space," Milosz writes, "I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night's own solitude in a universe without end!" And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“It’s true enough, of course, no longer to live on earth is strange, to abandon customs barely mastered yet, not to interpret roses and other auspicious things, not give them meaning in a human future. No longer to be as we have always been, in those endlessly anxious hands – to leave even our name behind us as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy. Strange, no longer to know desires desired – strange to witness the involvement of all things lost suddenly, each drifting away singly into space. And truly, to be dead is hard, so full of making up lost ground, till little by little we find a trace of eternity. Yet, the living are wrong to draw such distinctions so clearly: angels (it is said) are often never quite sure whether they pass among the living or the dead,”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.”
― Mary Robinette Kowal