Sarah

“The bad news is your flaws don’t come from nowhere. The world is deeply fucked from every angle; its damage is incomprehensibly vast and ancient, hooked into the future and printed upon you in endless, innumerable ways. You can’t reverse it. But art can unmake you differently. A perfect pop song, the kind that knees you in the chest while you’re standing in a checkout line, is the sound of something familiar resolving into something transcendent. A good poem finds the cracks in the foundations of your thinking and outlines them with glitter, or sets the whole building on fire. People make things with money they get from the government, or from jobs, or from stealing, and one time out of every 500 that you go to see those things they’ve made, some small corner of your world will come unlaced because of it. That’s not a lot, but it’s proof that the work of living can be more than just gesture: that there is more to do with structure than to surrender or be crushed by it. You can always be made a little more unsure; you can always be taken a little more apart.”
― Emma Healey

“Forgiveness with an agenda is manipulation. Mercy with a script is a drama. You don’t need another person to step up in order to move with compassion – it’s a dance step that can be done by one. Until they “dance” with you – dance alone.”
― Sandy Ohlman

“Silence is dangerous
We never permit it.
Our vocabulary may not be large
But there is no question that we put it
to constant use.
That’s what things are for:
to be used. And used.
And used.
Who knows?
If we didn’t talk and chatter from morning
till night (it doesn’t matter
whether or not anybody listens; that’s
not the point),
Words might start using us.
We never allow silence.
If sometimes it catches us unaware,
I am the first to screech across it
And shatter it to echoing fragments.
You never can tell:
if I listened to the silence
I might discover
that I am real.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Neither sadist nor masochist, I still
Must turn to violence: break, be broken.
False image of myself I beg you: kill.
Help me destroy the one of you I’ve spoken
Within my wilful heart. It is no more you
Than I am all that I would wish to be.
I cannot really love you till I hew
All these projections of an unreal me,
An imaged you, to shards. Then death
Will have a chance to free me for creation.
God! All this dying has me out of breath.
How do I understand reincarnation?
But if I burst all bonds of self-protection
Then may I find us both in resurrection.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle