Violence Was All. The Flower Bloomed And Faded. The Sun Rose And Sank. The Lover Loved And Went.

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

The darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Those lovers are mostly gone. My hands remain—: like altars.”

— Natalie Diaz, from The Hand Has Twenty-Seven Bones—: These Hands If Not Gods (via wishbzne)

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

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

Fifty Days at Iliam: The Fire The Consumes All Before It

Cy Twombly, 1978

Oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas

Photo taken from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

He cried as if crying was a language he alone knew and in it there was something urgent he needed to say.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Never finish a war without starting another.

Richard Siken, Birds Hover the Trampled Field

the precise sound of a flower bud

- Ross Gay, Weeping

but indirectly children know everything there is to know. They just don't know why.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty

as if you could not enjoy love without pain.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June