Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
—Hannah Arendt
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
—Jonathan Safran Foer
What matters is precisely this: the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.
—Virginia Woolf
What You Missed the Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade
Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.
After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.
—Brad Aaron Modlin
You don’t really understand an antagonist until you understand why he’s a protagonist in his own version of the world.
—John Rogers
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
—William Faulkner
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
––Ernest Hemingway
All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
—Leo Tolstoy
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
—Maggie Smith
I’d like to think every night contains a fissure where a couple of strangers are cast in the grand light of an approaching train, not the station where the train stops but the station where the station stops, and they choose something for which they are completely unprepared.
—J. Sweeney
Hope must be like barbed wire to keep out despair. Hope must be a minefield.
––Yehuda Amichai
There’s a boy in you about three
years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.
This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”
You live with this child, but you don't know it.
You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want
To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.
—Robert Bly
Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.
––Matthew 10:16
It seemed to Thomas that human beings charged around at far too vicious a pace, expecting to be assessed or used or summed up very quickly. It seemed to him that he belonged to some alien race, from some other planet, where the creatures sat around looking deeply into one another's eyes, sometimes for centuries, before they dared utter a word to each other.
—David Schickler
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
—W.S. Merwin
There are 32 ways to write a story, but only one plot: Things are not as they seem.
—J. Thompson
Courage
It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.
Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.
Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.
Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.
—Anne Sexton
The Creation Mother is always also the Death Mother, and vice versa. Because of this dual nature, or double-tasking, the great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. Our work is to apprehend the timing of both: to allow what must die to die, and what must live to live.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
—Tennessee Williams
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
—Michael Ondaatje
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
—Alain de Botton
They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn’t know the language or how anything here worked and hadn’t arrived with any money. And because they were forbidden by the humans to use their old language, they’d forgotten it so they couldn’t be much company or help to each other either. They couldn’t even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there ever were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects, not living creatures with souls.
—Russell Banks
There isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance, prevails.
––Raymond Carver
There was no anger in her eyes now but a calm, heroic grief.
—Nikos Kazantzakis
Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.
––Michael Ondaatje
Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? Or would you take it?
—Toni Morrison
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
—Pablo Neruda
Like you’re riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it’s sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.
––Haruki Murakami
Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
––Robert Bly
The words you speak become the house you live in.
—Hafiz
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth
and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,
and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.
And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though
no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.
—Tony Hoagland
If only he could touch her,
Her name like an old wish
In the stopped weather of salt
On a snail. He longs to be
Words, juicy as passionfruit
On her tongue. He’d do anything,
Would dance three days and nights
To make the most terrible gods
Rise out of ashes of the yew,
To step from the naked
Fray, to be as tender
As meat imagined off
The bluegill’s pearlish
Bones. He longs to be
An orange, to feel fingernails
Run a seam through him.
––Yusef Komunyakaa
The real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.
―Laura Ingalls Wilder
I like an ending that’s both a door and a window.
—Stanley Kunitz
Of the genesis of birds we know nothing,
save the legend they are descended
from reptiles: flying, snap-jawed lizards
that have somehow taken to air. Better the story
that they were crab-apple blossoms
or such, blown along by the wind; time after time
finding themselves tossed from perhaps a seaside tree,
floated or lifted over the thin blue lazarine waves
until something in the snatch of color
began to flutter and rise. But what does it matter
anyway how they got up high
in the trees or over the rusty shoulders
of some mountain? There they are,
little figments,
animated––soaring. And if occasionally a tern washes up
greased and stiff, and sometimes a cardinal
or a mockingbird slams against the windshield
and your soul goes oh God and shivers
at the quick and unexpected end
to beauty, it is not news that we live in a world
where beauty is unexplainable
and suddenly ruined
and has its own routines. We are often far
from home in a dark town, and our griefs
are difficult to translate into a language
understood by others. We sense the downswing of time
and learn, having come of age, that the reluctant
concessions made in youth
are not sufficient to heat the cold drawn breath
of age. Perhaps temperance
was not enough, foresight or even wisdom
fallacious, not only in conception
but in the thin acts
themselves. So our lives are difficult,
and perhaps unpardonable, and the fey gauds
of youth have, as the old men told us they would,
faded. But still, it is morning again, this day.
In the flowering trees
the birds take up their indifferent, elegant cries.
Look around. Perhaps it isn't too late
to make a fool of yourself again. Perhaps it isn't too late
to flap your arms and cry out, to give
one more cracked rendition of your singular, aspirant song.
––Charlie Smith
Know when to hold ‘em
Know when to fold ‘em
—Kenny Rogers
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
––Rainer Maria Rilke
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms you will not be
Coming back to.
—Donald Justice
This morning, with her, having coffee.
—Johnny Cash, when asked for his description of paradise
Keep this and only this:
what your heart beats loudly for
what feels full in your gut.
––S. Hostetler