“The world we knew has changed
but we have to arrange.
The strongest rocks will crack
but there is no way back.
Nothing worth anymore
the things that we adore.
Our rules disappear -
feel the upcoming fear. (…)
They can’t destroy our past
our memories will last.
What we are living for
doesn’t matter anymore.
We stay nevertheless
don’t lose selfconciousness.”
[photophor, New Order]
„I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are; stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.“
[A.J. Walker, The End of the World Running Club]
“… but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.”
P. Straub, Ghost Story
Of The Empire
We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. 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.
© 2008 by Mary Oliver
From her 2008 collection, Red Bird, p. 46
Published by Beacon Press 2008
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
— But who is that on the other side of you?”
T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land)
“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
“That night, after she’d screamed into her crumpled blanket for a long time and finally punched a hole through the darkness into that other place where the answers came from, the darkness began to speak to her, its voice more distinct than she had ever heard it before. The darkness touched her. Its touch was hard and warm, but somehow comforting, as if strong, invisible hands caressed her.”
[Excerpt: Schweitzer, Darrell: Sometimes you have to shout about it]
“Maybe tradition and ghosts are just remnants of a past you refuse to leave behind. We do not learn from the past, we just keep these remnants. And we put our faith in them. And with faith we create those spirits and spells, and become zealous guardians of our own fears.”
[Désirée Bressend, Call of the Suicide Forest, Heft 5]
“Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’ ”
Mary Anne Radmacher
„It’s more that people want to be alone. It’s more that there’s so little to say. It’s more that people are so tired.“
[E. Barnes, The City where we once lived]
