Most Definitely Me

“I am not a Sunday morning inside four walls
with clean blood
and organized drawers.
I am the hurricane setting fire to the forests
at night when no one else is alive
or awake
however you choose to see it
and I live in my own flames
sometimes burning too bright and too wild
to make things last
or handle
myself or anyone else
and so I run.
run run run
far and wide
until my bones ache and lungs split
and it feels good.
Hear that people? It feels good
because I am the slave and ruler of my own body
and I wish to do with it exactly as I please” 
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

Berthe Morisot

Roses, 1894

We are our words....

“ We are our words, and black and bruised and blue. Under our skins, we’re laughing. In triste veritas? Take hold, sweet hands, come on… Broken! When you falter, all eludes. This is a seasick way, this almost/never touching, this drawing-off, this to-and-fro. Subtlety stalks in your eyes, your tongue knows what it knows. I want your secrets—I will have them out. Seasick, I drop into the sea. ” — Adrienne Rich, “The Demon Lover”

Art by Gabriel Pacheco

Quote from The Etched City by K.J. Bishop

“Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching.” 
― K.J. Bishop, The Etched City

Quote for the New Year

“I do often intend a comic sense, I love a joke, I love the humorous. The name Isak means ‘laughter.’” —Isak Dinesen

Star-gazer by Louis Macneice

Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.

And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain. 

Quote by Faulkner

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t (sic) know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done….The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

—William Faulkner

Paul Bergon  Autochrome, circa 1910

Quote by Alice Bolin

“When a cop kills an unarmed man, it is because he senses his power being threatened by fear that he believes he should never have to feel. When a man kills his ex-girlfriend because she leaves him, he is saying the same thing: shame and sadness are feelings I should not have. Honor killings, as it turns out, are as American as apple pie.” 
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey —
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter —
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkstrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum —
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover —
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Turning to love

“Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.” 

― Laura Kasischke

from Writing Notebook

Boy: You're using me.

Girl: What?

Boy (looks at the clock): I get an hour or two, then you go.

Girl: What's wrong with that?

Boy: Where do you go when you leave here?

Girl: Nowhere. I drive. I just drive.

Book Quotes I Love

“Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, and we use rubble of the old to raise up new ones. Some memories are bright glass, blindingly beautiful when they catch the sun, but then there are the darker days, when they reflect only the crumbling walls of their derelict neighbours. Some memories are buried under years of patient construction; their echoing halls may never again be seen or walked down, but still they are the foundations for everything that stands above them.” 
                                            from The City's Son by Tom Pollack

Emily Bronte quote

'I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.' – Emily Brontë

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Happy 200th Birthday, Emily Bronte

https://melindajaneharrisonworld.tumblr.com/post/176453979756/tolrone-wuthering-heights

Today is Emily Bronte's 200th birthday. Happy Birthday and thank you Emily, for Wuthering Heights.

How I feel, too

https://melindajaneharrisonworld.tumblr.com/post/176312555336/i-was-fascinated-by-strangers-wanted-to-know-what

Afternoon on a Hill

I will be the gladdest thing 
 Under the sun! 
 I will touch a hundred flowers 
 And not pick one. 

 I will look at cliffs and clouds 
 With quiet eyes, 
 Watch the wind bow down the grass, 
 And the grass rise. 

 And when lights begin to show 
 Up from the town, 
I will mark which must be mine, 
 And then start down!

                 Edna St. Vincent Millay

Quote

“In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence...” 

― Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Widow

“We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” 
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I have become a "widow" and am in mourning, for all that I was and all that I will never be. I have lost my husband in a sea of memories, tears, and tomorrows yet to come. I reach out for my own hand and cannot find it. Something shadowed has replaced me,  a stranger struggling with illness and confusion, and minutes and hours and days alone, a kind of loneliness that has no solid definition.--Jane