guilty pleasures

when mary oliver said ‘if you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. give in to it.’

“I worry that my friends will misunderstand my silence as a lack of love, or interest, instead of a tent city built for my own mind.”

“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.”

“Literature, painting, music—the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.”