This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persu...
In a dog's life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open, some rugs would shred. Like any relationship, this one had its costs. They were costs we came to accept and balance against the joy and amusement and protection and companionship he ...
How do you manage for money?’ I asked. I was given two simultaneous replies of ‘We get by’ from Ian and ‘Don’t ask’ from Neil. I favoured Ian’s reply because it had less-sinister connotations. ‘Don’t ask’ left open the possibility...
Mom?" I said. She turned. "Can I talk to you about something?" "Of course, darling. Come here." I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say. "I need you to be --" I said, and then I started to cry. "Be what?" she said, opening...
Omer took a deep breath and stood up. 'It's a bad history without a doubt, he said. Nothing to be proud of.' He closed his eyes, turning his face to the side, right into the sun. 'So what are we going to do about it?' Then he opened his eyes, made a ...
There's something beautiful about facing tragedy, you crack open a new, you find yourself in the parts of you; that can finally be explored freely with out judgement or guilt. Where to from here doesn't exist & your not sure when it will return, but ...
So said Tochihuitzin, so said Coyolchiuhqui: We come out of the dream suddenly, we only come to dream, it isn't true, it isn't true that we come to live on the earth. Like grass in spring is our being. Our heart makes them grow, flowers sprout from o...
The moment you become miserly you are closed to the basic phenomenon of life: expansion, sharing. The moment you start clinging to things, you have missed the target--you have missed. Because things are not the target, you, your innermost being, is t...
During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surp...
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense t...
If a man we don't know phones us up one day and talks a little, makes no suggestions, says nothing special, but nevertheless pays us the kind of attention we rarely receive, we're quite capable of going to bed with him that night, feeling relatively ...
Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying, everything is absorbed through weather and the sea, and the moon swam back, its rays all silvered, and time and again the darkness would be broken by the crash of a wave, and every day o...
At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with which does not allow us to sleep. has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially i...
There was this movie that I would watch with her all the time, some stupid chick flick, and it had this opening line that would always make her catch her breath. 'I remember it hurt. Looking at her hurt', and I now realize that it was true. Every day...
So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and to...
God made a beauteous garden With lovely flowers strown, But one straight, narrow pathway That was not overgrown. And to this beauteous garden He brought mankind to live, And said "To you, my children, These lovely flowers I give. Prune ye my vines an...
Fragmentary Blue Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue? Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)-- Though some sav...
Acknowledge that some moments are just plain awful―desperate and gloomy and painful and miserable and nothing at all but anguish. No truthful, cheerful thought in the world will fix it. So let me cry awhile. Don't try to find a sunbeam where a shro...
Photographs don’t discriminate between the living and the dead. In the fragments of time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Now you see us; now you don’t. It doesn’t matter whether you look through a camera lens and press...
One can't prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person. If a man is keen on reading, I think he ought to open his mind to some older man who knows him and his life, and to take his advice i...
I Remember Years Ago, Someone Told Me I Should Take Caution When it Comes to Love, I Did So Tell Them All I Know Now Shout it From the Rooftops Write it On the Sky Line All We Had Is Gone Now Tell Them I Was Happy and My Heart is Broken All My Scars ...
