Performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith.

∆ Marilynne Robinson from Housekeeping

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call 'aware' — an almost untranslatable word meaning something like 'beauty tinged with sadness.'

∆ Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

I think of reality as a sentence, words on a page dadadda...

∆ Interview with Anne Carson: Life is Not Fair | Louisiana Channel

So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

∆ anne carson, gloves on!

oof

Summer dissolves in my mouth and I can't remember what it tasted like.

∆ Zoë Lianne, Erasure

There is the terror of too much uncertainty, and then there is the horror of knowing too much. The imagined versus the actual. I have a friend whose therapist tells him, 'You know too much to be happy'—meaning, it's too hard to live when you believe you can see how the rest of your life will play out. That may be what I miss most about youth: unknowing without fear. The future felt longer, yes—I was so rich with time, I could waste as much as I wanted—but not only longer. It was blanker.

∆ Elisa Gabbert, from On Recently Returned Books in Any Person is the Only Self (2024)

It’s strange how I’m reliving it, hour by hour, with the mission of neutralizing it, and transforming it into an inoffensive past that I can keep in my heart without either disowning it or suffering from it. That’s not easy. It’s at once painful and poetic.

∆ Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre c. January 1947 featured in Letters to Sartre

the throat of summer,

Ruins that are not ruins, but hymns of luminous memory.

∆ Hélène Cixous, from Coming to Writing and Other Essays