if i had my wilderness, nature could be my lover

“She is a profoundly gentle person… But this must be one reason for her terribly self-destructive history. She’s rarely known how to defend herself, except by withdrawal (tuning out, running away). How come she never developed even a normal capacity for hostility? … Too much insecurity to allow anger. But if there’s no anger experienced, one feels so vulnerable—”

“If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”

“I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.”

Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

“You have had you cerebral winter – your mental fevers. You weren’t happy. You rose to supreme heights of wisdom, of vision, but you were nervous and unhappy.”

“A winter sky, a soft warmish December sky whose tender ash grey makes of the rose with its rotting shades a transparent flower of amber.”

“…to be loved / and found magical, / like a secret…”

“Brittle, not from solitude but from mistrust, the aftermath of violence.”

“Perhaps you are obsessed by figments of your imagination, figures of your desire, stimulating enough to be exhausting, gloomy enough to be depressing.”