House of Fortitude

- Paul Auster / The Invention of Solitude

"As he came in her mouth a few moments later, with a long and throbbing flood of semen, he had this vision, at just that second, which has continued to radiate inside him: that each ejaculation con...

- Buckminster Fuller / No More Secondhand God

"Here is God's purpose-
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abst...

- Kurt Vonnegut / Cat’s Cradle

“So I was privileged to see the last rites of the Bokononist faith. We made an effort to find someone among the soldiers and the household staff who would admit that he knew the rites and would g...

- Ursula K. Le Guin / The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers...

- William Faulkner / Absalom, Absalom!

“Read it if you like or don't read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born...

- Carl Sagan / Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The ag...

- Ursula K. Le Guin / The Lathe of Heaven

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anyw...

- Max Ehrmann / Desiderata

"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth qui...

- Hermann Hesse / Siddhartha

“The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small child...

- Samantha Harvey / Orbital

“One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when th...

- Margaret Atwood / Morning in the Burned House

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melt...

- Aldous Huxley / Island

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happe...

- Jack Spicer / My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry

“Psychoanalysis: An Elegy"

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres...

- Henry Miller / Henry Miller On Writing

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.   That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as...

- Samuel Beckett / Watt

"Here he stood.  Here he sat.  Here he knelt.  Here he lay.  Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, fr...

- Margaret Atwood / Eating the Birds

“We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted the...

- Mary Oliver / Sometimes

1.

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
    or a flower,
unless it was both.

Somethin...

Poll 7.

I noticed that there's been a lovely uptick of members over the last few days. Welcome to my humble little Patreon one and all.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to get a little bit of a fe...

- Cormac McCarthy /  Suttree

"A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair he framed questions...

- Laurence Sterne / The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Chapter 2.XXXV.

No matter—as an appendage to seamstressy, the thread-paper might be of some consequence to my mother—of none to my father, as a mark in Slawkenbergius. Sl...

- Joan Didion / Sermon in the Suicide

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on...

- Sheila Heti / Pure Colour

“But you will be back, and you will always be here. Don’t think that in death you go far from the earth; you remain down here with everything—the part of you that loved, which is the most imp...

- Maggie Nelson / Bluets

"

23. Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life described by one critic as "a long interval, marked by nothing of distinguished note." Goethe himself de- scr...

- Leonora Carrington / The Hearing Trumpet

“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure...

- Alejandro Jodorowsky / The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

“I had to first overcome the nightmares: my dreams were populated by menaces, shadows, murderous persecutions, disgusting events and objects, ambiguous sexual relations that excited me while also...

- Robert Desnos / I’ve Dreamed of You So Much

"I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again?

I have dr...

- Paul Auster / Winter Journal

“You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or th...

- Sei Shōnagon / The Pillow Book

“71. Rare Things-- A son-in-law who's praised by his wife's father. Likewise, a wife who's loved by her mother-in-law.

A pair of silver tweezers that can actually pull out ha...

- Elias Canetti / Auto-da-Fé

“Another woman catches sight of Fischerle's hump on the ground and runs screaming into the street: 'Murder! Murder!' She takes the hump for a corpse. Further details - she knows none. The murdere...

- Elias Canetti / The Book Against Death

"All who missed out on life. All who were never loved. All who could not love. All who could not watch over a child. All who never traveled to other countries. All who never knew t...