Letters to Wassily

That break in the circle would really be an explosion of possibility.

Preferable to accepting one's insignificance is imagining the others hate you.

The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember; it's that you'll remember.

I’ve never seen compassion as an abstract noun. If you accept that we’re all composed largely of other people we’ve known, then compassion becomes a form of self-love. Compassion, composition. Awkwardness and grace live side by side. There’s a great line in a poem Ted Berrigan wrote about Anne Waldman: "If she is awkward at moments/Then those are awkward moments." If all the best writing is actually reportage, then the awkward moments have to live alongside of the grand ones. You have to stumble around for a while to get anywhere, and I try not to delete too much of the stumbling. It’s a performance idea: much of the pleasure is in watching the actor arrive at the mark, not just hit it. Compassion is also a kind of emptying out, so that new things can come in. Becoming very porous, receptive. The danger is to let that shiny luminous state become an affect, and I think that occurs when the awkwardness gets edited out. I’m very distrustful of uncut lyricism.

This is a good tree stump I'm sitting on. You can't even grasp your own pain let alone your eternal reward. I love you because you're me. I love you because there's nothing else to do. It's just the natural golden eternity.

Discard such definite imaginations of phenomena as your own self, thou human being, thou'rt a numberless mass of sun-motes: each mote a shrine. The same as to your shyness of other selves, selfness as divided into infinite number of beings, or selfness as identified as one self existing eternally. Be obliging and noble, be generous with your time and help and possessions, and be kind, because the emptiness of this little place of flesh you carry around and call your soul, your entity, is the same emptiness in every direction of space, unmeasurable emptiness, the same, one, and holy emptiness everywhere: why be selfly and unfree, Man God, in your dream? Wake up, thou'rt selfless and free. "Even and upright your mind abides nowhere," states Hui Neng of China. We're all in Heaven now.

When I write, dear reader, I don't want to build a careful tale for you to discuss with a smile in a sunny place, I want to own you.'

Reading as a writer is different than reading as a scholar. You read as a writer to steal. Everything you read should be a potential exploit, something you can learn and draw from.

I too had receiv’d identity by my Body; That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.

You're so quiet you're almost tomorrow.

If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there.

An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth...

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: by creating a work or doing a deed; by experiencing something or encountering someone; and by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering...Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Research is a lived thing.

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.