the word sanctuary

—the way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.

“At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?”

“Last night I danced on the rim of the moon,”

My tendency to romanticize made me want to verify what I felt. Now I trust my intuition and its strength.

how would you define "good" art?

“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again —”

“September tastes of ashes. And yet it insists. Softly. But it insists”

They wanted to blossom, / and blossoming is being beautiful. But we want to ripen, / and this means being dark and taking pains.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

[…] Admire as much as you can, most people don’t admire enough.

I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.

“To live for art (Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore, as Callas sings in Puccini’s Tosca), is to live a life of questioning.”

(…) one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns.

“The most precious thing is vitality – not in any sinister Lawrentian sense, but just the will + energy + appetite to do what one wants to do + not to be ‘sunk’ by disappointments. Aristotle is right: happiness is not to be aimed at; it is a by-product of activity aimed at.”

Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.

Women speaking of mirrors and prettiness make it all too clear that even for pretty women, mirrors are the foci of anxious, not gratified, narcissism. The woman who knows beyond a doubt that she is beautiful exists aplenty in male novelists’ imaginations; I have yet to find her in women’s books or women’s memoirs or in life. Women spend a lot of time looking in mirrors, but the “compulsion to visualize the self” is a phrase Moers uses of women in her chapter on Gothic freaks and horrors; the compulsion is a constant check on one’s (possible) beauty, not an enjoyment of it.

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.