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I don’t want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things.
Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain. I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses what war is.
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.
And if I come to you, to the door of your comfortable house with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails, will you put something into it?
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
May I never not be frisky, May I never not be risqué. May my ashes, when you have them, friend, and give them to the ocean, leap in the froth of the waves, still loving movement, still ready, beyond all else, to dance for the world.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck. He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen.
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.
All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
I wish I was twenty and in love with life and still full of beans.
Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes? If you say the right words, the wine expands. If you say them with love and the felt ferocity of that love and the felt necessity of that love, the fish explode into many. Imagine him, speaking, and don’t worry about what is reality, or what is plain, or what is mysterious. If you were there, it was all those things. If you can imagine it, it is all those things. Eat, drink, be happy. Accept the miracle. Accept, too, each spoken word spoken with love.
But I will not give them the kiss of complicity. I will not give them the responsibility for my life.
Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.
Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold or the night too long and as black as oil anyway, or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely of the second-rate, less than happiness as I stepped down from the porch and set out along the green paths of the world?
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
forgetting me, the house, the neat green yard, she fled in that lick of flame all tedious bonds: supper, the duties of flesh and home, the knife at the throat, the death in the metronome.
