Sometimes when I am reading a Greek text I force myself to look up all the words in the dictionary, even the ones I think I know. It is surprising what you learn that way. Some of the words turn out to sound quite different than you thought. Sometimes the way they sound can make you ask questions you wouldn't otherwise ask. Lately I have begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.
from "The Gender of Sound" by Anne Carson
— from Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
"[...] Revising the perceived sad ending of the entry, Geryon again borrows from “Red Meat,” this time its final fragment, writing, “All over the world the beautiful red breezes went on blowing hand/ in hand,” shifting away from self-centering and instead highlighting red’s continuance without him and its propensity for connection, despite Geryon’s own alienation. Redness is not exclusive to boys but can belong to breezes too."
— from Anne Carson: “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros” by Kristi Maxwell
If we’re being honest, most of us study our favourite character less like an entomologist studies a bug and more like an astronomer studies a distant star: drawing complicated inferences from extremely limited data, then getting tetchy about it when somebody else draws incompatible but equally well-supported inferences from the same data because it’s the fucking principle of the thing.
I must retire to my chamber now that you've turned on the biggie big head light but lament no more for I shall be vocal stimming very loudly from there so you could still enjoy the abundant warmth of my company
fitzjames petting neptune. if you even care.
Is it possible to develop a voice in writing with such coherence and quiet authority that I can do away with narrative structure? (Plot?) In the dream story, all that’s holding it together now is the voice, and maybe the imagery—holding it together against its own tendency to fragment, to fly apart. The pieces want to return to some other order—not with each other—but I compel them quite quietly to hold together my way.
from One Day I'll Remember This Diaries 1987–1995 by Helen Garner
Oh, what a happy fate, to sit in the silent room of an ancestral house among the quiet things in their abiding places, and to hear the tits sounding their first notes outside in the green and sun-shot garden, and away in the distance the village clock. To sit and gaze upon a warm strip of afternoon sunlight and to know a great deal about girls from the past and to be a poet. And to think that I too might have become such a poet if I had been able to live somewhere, anywhere on earth, in one of the many closed-up country houses that no one looks after. I would have required only one room (the sunny room under the gables). There I would have lived with my old things, my family portraits, my books. And I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a stout stick for the stony paths. And nothing else. Nothing but a book bound in yellowish, ivory-coloured leather with old-style floral endpapers: in this I would have written.
from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke