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Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.

~from This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

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Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations.

~from The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo

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Out there, in the fields and wood, on the moor and in the hedgerows, there are old gods, old ghosts, and old ways. People like us—women who wear trousers—we’re not always welcome there.

~from Through a Darkening Glass, by R.S. Maxwell

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Today, My Hope is Vertical

by Jane Hirshfield

Today, my hope is vertical. Tomorrow it will be horizontal. The next day, cloudy. My hope is like a Greek myth: exchanging skin for bark, bark for scales, scales for the hollow bones of a bird. In these ways my hope attempts to escape its fate. In myth, hope surely knows, escape is useless. Still, hope will try. I, who will someday leave behind this three-dimensioned puzzle, pity my hope. Poorling, I say to my hope, even I cannot spare you, even I cannot make you mortal. Winged, rooted, finned, roofed or roofless, of all my shapes, only you, hope, know nothing of irony, only you cannot be cynical or cloak yourself in the objectivity of grammar. Only you cannot suffer suffering. You exempt, you deny, you protest with speech and with silence. You forgive—helpless to not— in speech and in silence. I, citizen of perspective, born into the tribe of time, will vanish into its blurring distance. But you—most intransigent, most stubborn of all my parts— will be forced to continue. How tenderly, with two open hands, you reach again today for hunger's apple.

{from the April 8, 2024 print edition of The New Yorker}

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For most of history, music has been a rare thing. Every performance was fleeting. Constant access to music appears in descriptions of heaven.

~from A Taxonomy of Background Music (Sep 16, 2024) by Dayten Rose in DIRT MEDIA

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Resting is not a reward for success. It’s a prerequisite for performance.

~Melody Wilding

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Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone."

~William James

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You have a sacred duty to free your heart from fear.

~from a play titled Starball, by John Kaufman & Dan Dennis

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I want to make the kind of music that prepares you for dying.

~Brian Eno

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But I have all these waffle cones.

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still life disaster

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I believe in that.

IN 150 CHARACTERS OR LESS - Nikita Gill

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I wonder if there's a single place in the whole world that's never had a story. I bet not. I just about guarantee you there's no places like that in America. Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that's where something happened. Something wild, maybe something nobody knows about, but something. You can fall out of the sky and right into some forgotten storybook. You run and run and run and you keep turning pages and none of them are empty. They're all full of stories. There's nowhere left to write. I think I'm just a bookmark.

~from the interactive speculative fiction story 17776 Football

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What the fuck.

“You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”

— Epictetus

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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

~ from The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald