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“It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart.”
….
As if having found anchor, I’ve set down my heavy sea chest.
Foolishness perhaps.
Yet comforting.
As stories are sometimes meant to be”

"Dear Gail,
I think of you when the light grows sullen and scant. I send extra blessings hoping that more darkness can lead you to more dreaming."

fragment from a letter sent on winter solstice.

Nick Hunt “Wilderness Years” quotes wanderer Everett Ruess “I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.” And he vanished soon afterwards. His disappearance is still a mystery.

“Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe”

“I went to bed feeling happy about the future and in the thought of what the eighteen year old vote may do to change the crass defeatist atmosphere”

Whew… she wrote this in 1973. And the hope persists through the decades.

“I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines”

“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange-that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time spent alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening it has happened.”

Agnes has promised me snow tonight.

“How do you know, Agnes?” “Only this, Miss. Ever since I was a child, my fingers have tingled before a snow. And they’ve been tingling all day.”

I just found this exchange to be so precious. And then it snowed.

“Aunt Eugenia was not bothered. “For a duke, one would expect better.” Her ire was then back to me. “I was askance when Charles Goddard told me what had happened on Guy Fawkes Night. Askance.” I grimaced. “How very uncomfortable.” “I demand to see him.” “Guy Fawkes?”

The first of my laugh out loud book pauses.

“CATS ARE RARELY BOUND TO ONE PLACE FOREVER. IT’S THEIR NATURE.”

My resident house cats would beg to differ from the comfort of their respective couches as they contemplate the odds of convincing me to give them “second dinner”

““I make a go of it, when I can. It’s not my disposition to…what I mean to say is, I learned a long time ago that my happiness has to be separate from the things beyond my control.”

“But the barkeep stood there, crossing his arms as if to call my bluff.
What this man did not know was that I battled the great Lady Eugenia Spencer on a weekly basis and had lived with Cousin Matilde for three gruelling years. He did not scare me. I gripped the handle of the large glass and took a drink.

When I set it back on the table, I said, “Decent. I’ve had better.”

“Here is a distinguishing definition of Art that I like more than others:
Un monde vous frappe dans la poitrine et abolit tout ce qui n’est pas lui-Georgette Leblanc
(A world strikes you in the heart and leaves you unconscious of everything except it).”

“So I shall continue to love life on earth and all its ancient rituals.
I love shadowed rooms and wood fires, tall libraries full of subtle and leisurely books, accomplished conversational that flow for hours. I love essential people; their minds, their faculties, their bearing awe me. I also love people who have grace and flair, lightness of touch, and touching awarenesses”

Little Review credo

TO EXPRESS THE EMOTIONS OF LIFE IS TO LIVE.
TO EXPRESS THE LIFE OF EMOTIONS IS TO MAKE ART.
-written by Jane Heap

“I am tired of the “new writing” and of the “powerful new novelists”. I am tired of today’s new people; I am tired of their lives, of their tastes, their reading, their languages, their singing, their sedatives and psychiatrists, their houses, their furniture, and their faces.
All this being so, I have written about what I most love. And I love more things than I loathe”.
-Margaret Anderson

“I love yesterday, I deplore today, and I am hopeful of tomorrow because it can’t be so bad as today” -Margaret Anderson “The Little Review” credo

“Pooh to anyone who says humour trivializes everything. It allows you to approach tragedies that you would otherwise never dare to go near” - I hadn’t thought about “dark” humor quite in that light but it makes sense.

I missed this quote from The Pursuit I’d Love and am glad this author highlighted it.
“There they are, held like flies in the Amber of that moment-click goes the camera and on goes life;”

“At forty, all the distracting desires, ambitions, hopes and disappointments must have passed away, leaving the mind calm and satisfied with the affairs of every day, a state of which Ethel sometimes envied Miss Mole, more often pitied her…” - I don’t know whether to feel envious or rather bleak about this magical turn of the mind at the age of forty.

These essays never fail in prompting frequent pauses to place book and library orders. And now I’m intrigued by the 1897 written sleuth Miss Amelia Butterworth.
“I am not an inquisitive woman,” she begins, but ‘I could not resist the temptation of leaving my bed and taking a peep through the curtains of my window” - I’m hedging a guess she’s an inquisitive woman.

“So that’s what we have in common; we both wanted to escape, and we thought about it at the same moment”

“As the days grow shorter, we bring light into the house to repel the multiple darknesses that lurk there. I raid the cupboards for candles and hang fairy lights in the murkier corners, and I start to retell my story again, if only to myself. That’s what humans do: we make and remake our stories, abandoning ones that no longer fit and trying on new ones for size”

“Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those that have wintered”

“We’re raised not to recognise wintering or acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too greatly. We put on a brave public face and grieve privately; we pretend not to see other people’s pain. We treat wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored.”

“As time went on Laura grew accustomed to this recurrent autumnal fever. It was as much a sign of the season as the falling leaves or the first frost. Before the end of November it was all over and done with.” — I can relate.

“when she drew back the curtains she looked out upon the day with no curiosity. She had seen it already”. - I hadn’t thought of depression or feelings of melancholy quite described like this before. The monotony of sameness without the joy of anticipation.