Thinking… About… Um

fitzjames petting neptune. if you even care.

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

“And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“[…] the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.”

— Karen Russell, from “The Ghost Birds”

But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?

— Mary Oliver, from “Snowy Night”

“In the end I would rather wonder than know.”

— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey

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

writers and artists will go "this isn't good enough." my brother in christ, you're creating something new out of nothing and expressing yourself creatively. your productivity and unrealistic standards of perfection do not define you or the worth of your art. you're doing great.

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

him trying to fix the dress' strap me [saw it and got so hard i got nauseous] ,,,,, I think I hauve scurvy

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.

did you let me die in your arms in the timeloop