To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. 

(...) it is that I love you, but it’s more that when you say it back, lights out, a cold wind through curtains, for maybe the first time in my life, I believe it.

Thank You

June Storm

And I as well, I too felt ready to start life all over again. As if this great release of anger had purged me of evil, emptied me of hope; and standing before this symbolic night bursting with stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. 

The astonishing windy and altering light

The wonderful peacefulness of this sleepy summer flowed through me in great waves. At that moment, just as day was dawning, I heard the wail of sirens. They announced a journey to a world that was forever indifferent to my fate. 

In my first letter I wrote of a rainbow in my breast. That rainbow is not of the refined beauty of the light of fireflies or of the stars. If it were so faint and faraway, I would not be suffering this way, and I could probably forget you gradually. The rainbow in my breast is a bridge of flames. It is a sensation so strong that it chars my breast. 

I was the only person on God’s cold, green earth who cared about him, who knew his speech and silence, knew his arms, and did not carry a knife. The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.

And, lying on my bed in some frigid biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel how even my sadness can make me happy, how wall to wall carpet and fake Biedermeier furniture and a softly murmuring French announcer on Canal Plus can all somehow seem so necessary and right.

Most of the benches bore the names of benefactors—in memory of Mrs. Ruth Klein or whatever—but my mother’s bench, the Rendezvous Point, alone of all the benches in that part of the park had been given by its anonymous donor a more mysterious and welcoming message: EVERYTHING OF POSSIBILITY.

Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

(...) we live exclusively in the present because it is always eternally today and tomorrow will be a today, eternity is the state of things at this very moment.