Polished Pistil

I was feeling everything too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes.

Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.

Yōko Ogawa, The Diving Pool

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it — and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But — I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“It is strange to both fit in everywhere and belong nowhere, to never feel completely at home outside of your own skin” ― Maquita Donyel Irvin, Stories of a Polished Pistil: Unpaved

Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, Who? Who?

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Seek for the pleasure of seeking, not of finding.

Jorge Luis Borges, In Praise of Darkness