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“Today I’m flying low and I’m not saying a word. I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.”

— Mary Oliver, from “A Thousand Mornings; Today”, first published c. 2012.

Kisses and coffees in Ron Hicks’ impressionistic paintings.

“Tongue on fire. Heart of stone.”

— Mary Oliver, from “A Thousand Mornings; Out of the Stump Rot, Something”, first published c. 2012.

“Also the words of poets / a hundred or hundreds of years dead / their words that would not be held back.”

— Mary Oliver, from “A Thousand Mornings; Hum, Hum”, first published c. 2012.

“Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter?”

— Mary Oliver, from “A Thousand Mornings; I Happened To Be Standing”, first published c. 2012.

“… the words moving underneath the shadows we made”

— Ocean Vuong, from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, published c. 2019.

Giovanni Strazza,“The Veiled Virgin”.

“What frightens me, I admit, is that I am still very young. It seems to me sometimes that my real life has not begun. Take me away from here and give me some reason for living. I have none left. I have freed myself. That may be. But what does it signify? This objectless liberty is a burden to me.”

— André Gide,from“The Immoralist”, tr. Dorothy Bussy and published c. 1930.

original text: “Ce qui m'effraie c'est, je l'avoue, que je suis encore très jeune. Il me semble parfois que ma vraie vie n'a pas encore commencé. Arrachez moi d'ici à présent, et donnez moi des raisons d'être. Moi, je ne sais plus en trouver, je me suis délivré, c'est possible; mais qu'importe? Je souffre de cette liberté sans emploi.”

“And suddenly I was seized with a desire, a craving, something more furious and more imperious than I had ever felt before—to live! I want to live! I will live. I clenched my teeth, my hands, concentrated my whole being in this wild, grief-stricken endeavour towards existence.”

— André Gide, from “The Immoralist”, tr. Dorothy Bussy and published c. 1930.

original text: “Et soudain me prit un désir, une envie, quelque chose de plus furieux, de plus impérieux que tout ce que j'avais ressenti jusqu'alors: vivre ! je veux vivre. Je veux vivre. Je serrai les dents, les poings, me concentrai tout entier éperdument, désolément, dans cet effort vers l'existence.”

HANDLING DEATH — HOLDING SKULLS IN ART.

• Francisco de Zurbarán,“Saint Francis in Meditation”
• Adriaen van Cronenburgh,“Katheryn of Berain”
• Carl Friedrich Schmid,“Portrait of a Man, Wearing Academic Robes and Holding a Skull”
• “Portrait of an Old Woman with a Crucifix and a Skull”
• Charles Augustin Wauters,“Franciscan Monk in Contemplation of the Bible”
• Salvator Rosa,“A Hermit Contemplating a Skull”
• “Sir Richard Bagot”
• Pieter Coecke van Aelst the elder,“Portrait of a Man with a Skull”
• Alexis-Simon Belle,“Portrait of an Augustinian Canoness, Called Winifred Cufaude”
• “A Young Man with a Skull”

“But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence — I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

— Ocean Vuong, from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”

“Of all pastimes, it has been generally allowed by all who have had least insight into the game, that Chess is the most noble, as well as most fascinating: Kings and warriors have studied it, the former to establish laws, and the latter to plan engagements in the field; the mathematician has diligently examined its positions, to discover the solution of problems; and writers on education have concurred in recommending the cultivation of this pleasing exercise of the mind: at the same time, many are deterred from acquiring a knowledge of the game, owing to a false idea that it requires so mathematical a genius as to be suitable only for a Newton or a Euclid.”

— William Stopford Kenny, from “Practical Chess Grammar, or an Introduction to the Royal Game of Chess”, published c. 1818.

“When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”

— Warsan Shire, from “Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth: Conversation About Home (At The Deportation Center)”, published c. 2011.

“I want to make love, but my hair smells of war and running and running.”

— Warsan Shire, from “Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth: Conversation About Home (At The Deportation Center)”, published c. 2011.

“Your daughter’s face is a small riot, her hands are a civil war, a refugee camp behind each ear, a body littered with ugly things. But God, doesn’t she wear the world well?”

— Warsan Shire, from “Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth: Ugly”, published c. 2011.

“My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.”

— Warsan Shire, from “Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth: Conversation About Home (At The Deportation Center)”, published c. 2011.

“I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.”

— Warsan Shire, from “Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth: Conversation About Home (At The Deportation Center)”, published c. 2011.

“Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says. Slow like cancer in the breast or fast like a machete in the neck.”

— Warsan Shire, from “Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth: My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want To Be Touched”, published c. 2011.

“To my daughter I will say,

‘when the men come, set yourself on fire’.”

— Warsan Shire, from “Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth: In Love And In War”, published c. 2011.

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