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House of Fortitude

House of Fortitude

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House of Fortitude posts

- Han Kang / The White Book

frost

The day she was born was one of frost rather than snow, yet her father chose seol, snow, as one of the characters for his daughter’s name. Growing up, s...

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- Luis Alberto Urrea / The Hummingbird's Daughter

Chapter One

ON THE COOL OCTOBER MORNING when Cayetana Chavez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to bree...

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- Hélène Cixous / The Laugh of the Medusa (translated by Paula and Keith Cohen)

"I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as fr...

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- Virginia Woolf / The Waves

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on t...

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- Mary Oliver / “Invitation,” A Thousand Mornings (New York: Penguin Books, 2013).

Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy

and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles

for a music...

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- Annie Dillard / The Force That Drives the Flower (What is it about fecundity that so appalls? Is it that with nature's bounty goes a crushing waste that threatens our own cheap lives?)

I wakened myself last night with my own shouting. It must have been that terrible yellow plant I saw pushing through the flood-damp soil near the log by Tinker Creek, the plant as fleshy and featur...

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Poll 6.

I am thinking of making more of a concerted effort in the new year to nurture conversation and discussion on my Patreon. Not as a cynical ploy to keep people engaged but rather because I just like ...

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- Muriel Rukeyser / Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (University of Pittsburgh Press May 10th 2014)”

“Three Sides of a Coin"

Am I in your light?
                       &nb...

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- Margaret Atwood / Two-Headed Poems

“The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart


I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break; View Post

- Aldous Huxley / Brave New World

“Isn't there something in living dangerously?'

There's a great deal in it,' the Controller replied. 'Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.'

What?' que...

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- Federico García Lorca / Quasida of the Woman Prone

To see you naked is to remember the Earth,
the smooth Earth, clean of horses,
the Earth without reeds, pure form,
closed to the future, confine of silver.

To see you naked is to und...

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- Derek Walcott / Selected Poems

“Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was ...

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- Annie Dillard / Holy the Firm

"The god of today is rampant and drenched. His arms spread, bearing moist pastures; his fingers spread, fingering the shore. He is time’s live skin; he burgeons up from day like any tree. His leg...

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- Kahlil Gibran / The Prophet

"You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons,
and to step out of life's procession, that marches in maje...

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- Rainer Maria Rilke / Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing---
each stone, blossom, child---<...

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- James Joyce / Ulysses

"Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.
— Persecution, says he, all the history of the ...

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- Alejandra Pizarnik / Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

“Paths of the mirror"

I
And above all else, to look with innocence. As if nothing was happening, which is true.

II
But you, I want to look at you until your face escapes from ...

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- Federico García Lorca / City That Does Not Sleep

“In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do n...

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- David Mitchell / Ghostwritten

“Go on, my dear," urges the snake. "Take one. Hear it? 'Pluck me,' it's saying. That big, shiny red one. 'Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.' You know you want to."

"But God," quote...

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- The Tao Te Ching / Lao Tzu (Translated by Stephen Mitchell, 1988)

1
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is th...

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- David Mitchell / The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted door...

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- Herman Melville / Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white de...

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- Terrance Hayes / Wind in a Box

“Wind in a Box"

—after Lorca

I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket
of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice.
I want to learn to walk without blinking.
...

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The Upanishads / Translation by Eknath Easwaran

“Place this salt in water and bring it here tomorrow morning".

The boy did.

"Where is that salt?" his father asked?

"I do not see it."

"Sip here. How does it taste?" View Post

- Julio Cortázar / Hopscotch

“I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I h...

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- Fyodor Dostoevsky / White Nights

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dr...

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- Tom Robbins / Jitterbug Perfume

“The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind fo...

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- Luis Alberto Urrea / The Hummingbird's Daughter

"Bandits. I kind of miss them," Segundo said. "Have you heard tell of La Carambada?"

"No."

"This is a true story."

Tía tipped ash into her mouth and tapped her foot: this was ...

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- Saul Bellow / Humboldt's Gift

“What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eati...

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- Tom Robbins / Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

“All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”

At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he...

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