David Foster Wallace
- Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
Barbara Brown Taylor
To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger - these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone.
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
- Notes From the Underground
I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased. Then again, I don't know a thing about my illness; I'm not even sure what hurts.
MOLBIOL 2C03
- What is a chimeric gene?
A chimeric gene is one in which the regulatory and coding sequences are derived from two or more genes, and combined in a novel manner. Combining the regulatory code from sequences from one gene and the regulatory sequences from another often results in a gain of function allele due to ectopic expression.
Louise Gluck
- Sunrise
And if you missed a day, there was always the next; and if you missed a year, it didn't matter. The hills weren't going anywhere, the thyme and rosemary kept coming back, the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit.
Vladmir Nabokov
- letter to Vera Nabokov
It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you - and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created - out of five vowels and three consonants.
Anne Sexton
- letter to Anne Clarke
I feel lonely. I feel worse - strange. And when I leave I cry in the car. And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers. Anne... people are strangers. I don't know if I can go on spilling myself out to people - those strange strangers. As I may have said, I am not at home in myself. I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.
May Sarton
- Now I Become Myself
As slowly as the ripening fruit - fertile, detached, and always spent, falls but does not exhaust the root - so all the poem is, can give, grows in me to become the song, made so and rooted by love. Now there is time and Time is young. O, in this single hour I live all of myself and do not move. I, the pursued, who madly ran, stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
Vladimir Nabokov
- Letters To Vera
Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought - and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.
Sylvia Plath
- I Am Vertical
Compared with me, a tree is immortal and a flower-head not tall, but more startling, and I want the one's longevity and the other's daring. It is more natural to me, lying down. Then the sky and I are in open conversation, and I shall be useful when I lie down finally: then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
Iris Murdoch
- The Sea, The Sea
Yes, you are frightened Charles. It's interesting, it's a revelation, it's so easy to frighten people, to bewilder them and persecute them and terrify them out of their wits and make their lives a misery.
Norman Craig
- Incident
I look across the table and think (fiery with love), ask me, go on, ask me to do something impossible; something freakishly useless, something unimaginable and inimitable. Like making a finger break into blossom or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes or remembering tomorrow. I will you to ask it. But all you say is, Will you give me a cigarette? And I smile and, returning to the marvelous world of possibility, I give you one with a hand that trembles with a human trembling.
Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, for considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ellen Bass
- The World Has Need of You
I can hardly imagine it as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient prayer of my arms swinging in counterpoint to my feet. It's a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little. Does the breeze need us? The cliffs? The gulls? If you've managed to do one good thing, the ocean doesn't care. But when Newton's apple fell toward the earth, the earth, ever so slightly, fell towards the apple as well.
Catherine M Valente
- The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
They are hungry, too, you know. At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much, more than they can stomach, but the appetite doesn't converse much with the stomach. Everyone is hungry and not only for food - for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them.
Mary Oliver
- moments
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled. Like, telling someone you love them. Or giving your money away, all of it. Your heart is beating, isn't it? You're not in chains, are you? There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.
Jason Craig
- Art In Violence P2
I'm sorry! I'm just trying to understand. I mean, is it simply your midlife crisis that's chasing you down? Is your dragon like a mythical red sports car? With painted wing decals, and rumbling muffler? Or more like a Kevorkian pill that you must swallow before your mouth dries shut completely? Would it be so sad to die slowly in bed, would that be so bad, Beowulf?
Jason Craig
- Art In Violence
Is it that you can't cope with all this loneliness as you age? Is that what it is, Beowulf? Are you suddenly realizing that society is built on strength of youth, not has-been done-dids with bad hip and liver spots and blood clots? Afraid your retinue is sick of hearing your old war stories and they will move you into a retirement community, with nurses whispering behind your back, and bed-bags full of messy fluids?
Thomas Hardy
- Tess of the D'Ubervilles
I don't know about ghosts, but I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive. A very easy way to feel 'em go is to lie on the grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds of miles away from your body, which you don't seem to want at all.
Anne Sexton
- Yellow
When they turn the sun on again, I'll plant children under it; I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing. I'll spoon feed myself spoonfuls of heat and everyone will be home playing with their wings and the planet will shudder with all those smiles and there will be no poison anywhere, no plague in the sky, and there will be a mother-broth for all of the people and we will never die, not one of us. We'll go on won't we?
