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“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“All languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by combining the prefix meaning "with" (com-) and the root meaning "suffering" (Late Latin, passio). In other languages, Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance - this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means "feeling".
In languages that derive from Latin, "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, "pity", connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To take pity on a woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.
That is why the word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In languages that derive from Latin, "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, "pity", connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To take pity on a woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.
That is why the word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
1. A beginning ends what an end begins.
2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.
3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself.
4. The best time is stolen time.
5. All work is the avoidance of harder work.
6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.
7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music.
8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?
9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation.
10. Writer: how books read each other.
11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love.
12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything.
13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough.
14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.
15. There are silences harder to take back than words.
16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.
17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.
18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.
19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.
20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do.
21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of.
22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.
23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open).
24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?”
―
1. A beginning ends what an end begins.
2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.
3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself.
4. The best time is stolen time.
5. All work is the avoidance of harder work.
6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.
7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music.
8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?
9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation.
10. Writer: how books read each other.
11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love.
12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything.
13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough.
14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.
15. There are silences harder to take back than words.
16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.
17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.
18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.
19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.
20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do.
21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of.
22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.
23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open).
24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?”
―
Dicapria’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Dicapria’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
465 books
|
113 friends
1,159 books
|
104 friends
341 books
|
169 friends
7 books
|
152 friends
203 books
|
52 friends
50 books
|
27 friends
191 books
|
205 friends
101 books
|
52 friends
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