I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.
The “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
We got rid of the day as well as we could.
The real issue with speed is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.
If you draw, the world becomes more beautiful, far more beautiful. Trees that used to be just scrub suddenly reveal their form. Animals that were ugly make you see their beauty. If you then go for a walk, you’ll be amazed how different everything can look. Less and less is ugly if every day you recognize beautiful forms in ugliness and learn to love them.
It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.”
“I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”
Our relationship was not abusive; it was a fight, not a battle; it was a competition for the oxygen in the room.
What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications.
And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.
While we use recipes to inspire us, we never abandon our senses. Chiefly, taste. Taste is everything.
[On Van Gogh] A chair, a bed, a pair of boots. His act of painting them was far nearer than that of any other painter to the carpenter’s or the shoemaker’s act of making them.
What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
There is no way of comparing the time of the hare with that of the tortoise except by using an abstraction which has nothing to do with either.
The principal function of painting, until recently, was to depict, to make as if continually present, what soon was to be absent.
Physically his body, simplified by burning to the element of carbon, re-enters the physical process of the world.
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace.
Yet poetry uses the same words, and more or less the same syntax as, say, the Annual General Report of a multinational corporation. (Corporations that prepare for their profit some of the most terrible battlefields of the modern world.) How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of a god?
One’s death is already one’s own. It belongs to nobody else: not even to a killer. This means that it is already part of one’s life.
A name and two dates, the last one precise to the very day. This is what is recorded. About what happened between, apart from the bare fact of survival, not a word is written.
The masses, the required anonymous labor force, persist in remaining a population of individuals, despite their living and working conditions, despite their displacement.
I have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present.
Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.