Disintegrating stories (Solnit)

A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't.

Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Thought

Poetry can exist in a few breaths as readily as in a lengthy oration. Perhaps more readily.

A certain curious phenomenon (Solnit)

Jaime de Angulo, the wild Spanish storyteller-anthropologist who eighty years ago spent considerable time among these people, wrote, "I want to speak now of a certain curious phenomenon found among the Pit River Indians. The Indians refer to it in English as 'wandering.' They say of a certain man, 'He is wandering,' or 'He has started to wander.' It would seem that under certain conditions of mental stress an individual finds life in his accustomed surroundings too hard to bear. Such a man starts to wander. He goes about the country, traveling aimlessly. He will stop here and there at the camps of friends or relations, moving on, never stopping at any place longer than a few days. He will not make any outward show of grief, sorrow or worry.... The Wanderer, man or woman, shuns camps and villages, remains in wild, lonely places, on the tops of mountains, in the bottoms of canyons."

Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

In the place called lost (Solnit)

But in the place called lost strange things are found...

Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

To be chosen (Solnit)

Justice, a book on classical lore asserted, stood at the gates of Hades deciding who would go in, and to go in was to be chosen for refinement through suffering, adventure, transformation, a punishing route to the reward that is the transformed self.

Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Not the mountain (Hirshfield)

If you lived higher up on the mountain,
I find myself thinking, what you would see is
more of everything else, but not the mountain.

Jane Hirshfield, from "Vilnius"

Agog (Fry)

I sometimes think I’m a visitor to my own self. I am simply agog to discover what I’ll be up to next.

Stephen Fry

Video

For the MMORPG crowd (and/or fans of the superb Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog): a parody video by Felicia Day and members of The Guild: "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?"

On the world (Muir)

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

John Muir, from Northwest Passages

In books (Conroy)

I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.

Frank Conroy, from Stop-Time

Thought

There is more revelation in garbage than in grandeur.

Hugos

How significant is it that 3 of the 5 Hugo nominees this year for best novel (including the winner) are children's books? Hmm.

The reward of art (Connolly)

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.

Cyril Connolly

Thought

Without a history of evolutionary pressures and adaptations, there can only be a facsimile of the madness of love.