Michael > Recent Status Updates

“Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with the written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.”

“In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed.”

“He had never understood why anyone should want to put someone who had mattered to them into a novel. Once that person had drifted into a novel in much the same way as one might walk through a mirror, he escaped from you forever. He had never existed in real life. He had been reduced to nothingness… You needed to go about it in a more subtle way.”

“But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And tjis state of the soul is called wisdom.”

“On a day about which I cannot write in the present tense, the cherry trees will have been in blossom. I will have avoided thinking, ‘exploded,’ the cherry trees have exploded, although only one year earlier I could not only think but also say it readily, if not entirely with conviction.”

“It was an obsession of mine to want to know what had occupied a given location in Paris, over successive layers of time.”

“Anyway, the truest encounters take place between two people who ultimately know nothing about each other, even at night in a hotel room.”

“But you see it is necessary, Socrates, to care for the opinion of the public, for this very trouble we are in now shows that the public is able to accomplish not by any means the least, but almost the greatest of evils, if one has a bad reputation with it.”

“For to fear death, gentlemen, is nothing else than to think one is wise when one is not; for it is thinking one knows what one does not know. For no one knows whether death be not even the greatest of all blessings to man, but they fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils. And is not this the most reprehensible form of ignorance, that of thinking one knows what one does not?”

I had been alone for weeks when we met there,
below Dante. The three of us lounged in a ‘pensione,’
I was writing a book about a dying man.
Twenty years later, you were in a bed,
on Brunswick Avenue. And I kissed your feet,
Connie, one of my shy farewells.

It was your year of last things,
but you were luminous,
within those final fires.

The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others.

“”Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see.”

“I have always thought that certain places are magnets and that you are drawn to them if you walk about in their vicinity. And it happens imperceptively, without you even suspecting. All that is needed is a street on a slope, a sunny pavement, or else a pavement in the shade. Or else a downpour. And this leads you there, to the exact point where you were meant to end up.”

“Such is the true nature of the animal that calls itself man: he will shift with every wind and tag along with anything as long as he is allowed to continue here on earth, under the sun, in any condition and shape and at any price.”

“[A]s she guides her needle and thread through the warp and woof of the stocking, Miss Raika lets her mind wander between daydreams and menories, dwelling now on one, now on the other, from stitch to stitch, from memory to memory, as if the needle were rethreading the whole fabric of her life.”

“You see that piece of ground over yonder, Pluto? Well, that’s God’s little acre. I set aside an acre of my farm for God twenty-seven years ago, when I bought this place, and every year I give the church all that comes of that acre of ground. If it’s cotton, I give the church all the money the cotton brings at market. The same with hogs, when I raised them, and about corn, too, when I plant it.”