moonmovement

Latest Posts by moonmovement

While I haven’t updated this blog in a bit (I finished my MSc degree which left little room for enjoyment reading), I have begun to pleasure read again (I cannot describe how much I’ve missed Austen) and will be updating shortly.

I also am fully planning on diving headfirst into religious studies as a hobby in 2024, so forthcoming content will reflect this in due time.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead. (Prescience? Perhaps.) 'Which means exactly what?' (Arched eyebrows, a little annoyed.) I tried to explain, but didn't do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin. This is what I wrote: To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

How I did waste and exhaust my heart.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

Dum pudeo pereo (as I blush, I die) says an old love song. Blood rushes to the face, at the same time the heart seems to wither on itself and snap,

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

the light is not something you see, exactly. You don't look at it, or breathe, you feel a pressure but you don't look. It is like being in the same room as a man you love. Other people are in the room. He may be smoking a cigarette. And you know you are not strong enough to look at him (yet) although the fact that he is there, silent and absent beside a thin wisp of cigarette smoke, hammers you. You rest your chin on your hand, like a saint on a pillar. Moments elongate and drop. A radiance is hitting your skin from somewhere, every nerve begins to burn outward through the surface, your lungs float in a substance like rage, sweet as rage, no! - don't look.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

The light is astounding, a hammer.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of the bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

For his conversations about action (we have had more than one) are all descriptions of God

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

We live by the waters breaking out of the heart.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

Are there two ways of knowing the world? a submissive and a devouring way. They end up roughly the same place.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

He lives in a small country of hope which is his heart.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

All the bells say: too late.

John Berryman, Dream Song 29

Much has been said and written about the ‘haiku moment’ - that it blurs the distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘self’ and ‘other’; that in it the perception of the essential and accidental, of the beautiful and the ugly, disappears; that it reflects things are they are in themselves.

- Yoel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems

to want and to wonder are parallel actions

- Jessica Fisher, Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics

I am the fire, says the fire. My body is a graveyard,

says the landscape. You’re welcome, says the landscape.

- Richard Siken, Landscape with Several Small Fires

Never finish a war without starting another.

Richard Siken, Birds Hover the Trampled Field

When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.

Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede

I wish I had something else. A redemptive imagination

Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede

To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.

Richard Siken, Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors

I lay exhaling human feelings

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

It may be that we have become more interesting to each other at the expense of trust.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

'But you tell me profound loves do not satisfy you. You crave to give and to receive stronger sensations. I understand, but that is only a phase. You can play the game now and then, to heighten passion, but profound loves are the loves which suit your true self, and they alone will satisfy you. The more you act like yourself the nearer you come to a fulfillment of your real needs. You are still terribly afraid to be hurt; your imaginary sadism shows that. So afraid to be hurt that you want to take the lead and hurt first. I do not despair of reconciling you to your own image.'

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

as if you could not enjoy love without pain.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

In a moment I could destroy the entire legend, from beginning to end, destroy everything, except the fundamentals

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

I always want to see you laughing. It belongs to you.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

'Come close to me, come closer. I promise it will be beautiful.'

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June