Prose

Marguerite Yourcenar, from "Memoirs of Hadrian"

“I knew almost nothing of these women; the part of their lives they conceded to me was narrowly confined between two half-opened doors; their love, of which they never ceased talking, seemed to me sometimes as light as one of their garlands; it was like a fashionable jewel, or a fragile and costly fillet, and I suspected them of putting on their passion with their necklaces and their rouge. My own life was not less mysterious to them; they hardly desired to know it, preferring to dream vaguely, and mistakenly, about it; I came to understand that the spirit of the game demanded these perpetual disguises, these exaggerated avowals and complaints, this pleasure sometimes simulated and sometimes concealed, these meetings contrived like the figures of a dance. Even in our quarrels they expected a conventional response from me, and the weeping beauty would wring her hands as if on the stage.” 

Marguerite Yourcenar, from "Memoirs of Hadrian"

“That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry.”

Herman Hesse, from "Steppenwolf"

“…As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbour was as strongly forced upon him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”

Deborah Love, from "Annaghkeen"

“…When I was a child I rode my horse to the top of the mountain where the sun shone down on me, and the valley green in meadow grass lay far below. I looked to the sky and waited, filled with longing. Nothing sounded. In sorrow I lay down on the earth, my arms outstretched to hug it. O Earth, warm and just right, everything just right, the shape of bark, and smell of grass, and sound of leaves brushing the wind, I wanted to be just right too.”

From "A Silent Treatment" - Jeannie Vanasco

“I think back to that first example. I remember unloading the plants Chris and I had picked out from Home Depot (clematis, honeysuckle, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum), some of which would attract the hummingbirds [my mother] enjoyed watching. I’d also bought two birdbaths. I hid those in the garage because they were her Easter gift. I then went inside to call downstairs, but her door was locked.

She must have seen the plants on the deck—maybe when she walked [her dog] or took out her trash—and assumed we’d ignored or forgotten her.

I texted: We couldn’t fit everything in the car in one trip. We still planned to take you today.

I repeated this in a letter that I left in her private entryway: I’m sorry I didn’t explain our plans first. We still planned to take you to Home Depot.

It’s easy to say how ridiculous she was being, but it’s harder, and almost unutterably heartbreaking, to see Home Depot’s significance through her point of view. For Chris and me, it was another errand. She looked forward to the trip all week.”

From "The Return of Faraz Ali" - Aamina Ahmad

“He walked out into the garden, which was small but well tended. There were new trees, and the lawn was lush and green. Swept up in the celebration of his return, he’d forgotten how foul, how filthy he was from the travel, the camp. He felt it now. He took off his shoes. In the camp, he had spent a long time wondering what he would do when he got home. What is the first thing, the men liked to ask one another. Food, sex. And it was true, in prison you recognized the appetites you were denied; you longed for those things above all because after a time you got used to not having them, your longing declining, and in that decline you recognized you were not the man you were before. You feared you would never be that man again. What had he thought of? The same, yes, of course, but also this: the outline of the trees in the evening, the cool grass against his feet, an open door, and walking through it and back in again as he pleased.”

Arthur Schopenhauer - from "On Human Suffering"

“This is the mystery…it reveals to us that all those beings living at the present moment contain within them the actual germ of all which will live in the future, and that these therefore in a certain sense exist already. So that every animal in the full prime of life seems to call to us: ‘Why do you lament the transitoriness of living things? How could I exist if all those of my species which came before me had not died?’

However much the plays and the masks on the world’s stage may change it is always the same people who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.”

John Berger, from "Ways of Seeing"

“If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen.
The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue.
And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this—an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things.’”

Rene Magritte - “The Interpretation of Dreams” - 1935

Agnolo Bronzino - “Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love” - 1545

Johannes Vermeer - “Maid with Milk Jug” - 1657

Paul Tillich on Courage (From, "The Courage to Be")

“…The aristocratic element in the doctrine of courage was preserved as well as restricted by Aristotle. The motive for withstanding pain and death courageously is, according to him, that it is noble to do so and base not to do so. The courageous man acts ‘for the sake of what is noble, for that is the aim of virtue.’ ‘Noble,’ in these and other passages, is the translation of kalós and “base” is the translation of aischró, words which usually are rendered by ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly.’ A beautiful or noble deed is a deed to be praised. Courage does what is to be praised and rejects what is to be despised. One praises that in which a being fulfills its potentialities or actualizes its perfections. Courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of ‘in spite of.’ It includes the possible and, in some cases, the unavoidable sacrifice of elements which also belong to one’s being but which, if not sacrificed, would prevent us from reaching our actual fulfillment. This sacrifice may include pleasure, happiness, even one’s own existence. In any case it is praiseworthy, because in the act of courage the most essential part of our being prevails against the less essential. It is the beauty and goodness of courage that the good and the beautiful are actualized in it. Therefore it is noble.”

Arthur Schopenhauer on the soul, from "On The Suffering of the World"

The present has two halves: an objective and a subjective. The objective half alone has the intuition of time as its form and thus streams irresistibly away; the subjective half stands firm and thus is always the same. It is from this that there originates our lively recollection of what is long past and, despite our knowledge of the fleetingness of our existence, the consciousness of our immortality.

Whenever we may live we always stand, with our consciousness, at the central point of time, never at its termini, and we may deduce from that that each of us bears within him the unmoving mid-point of the whole of endless time. It is fundamentally this which gives us the confidence to live without being in continual dread of death.

He who, by virtue of the strength of his memory and imagination, can most clearly call up what is long past in his own life will be more conscious than others of the identity of all present moments throughout the whole of time. Through this consciousness of the identity of all present moments one apprehends that which is most fleeting of all, the moment, as that alone which persists. And he who, in such intuitive fashion, becomes aware that the present, which is in the strictest sense the sole form of reality, has its source in us, and thus arises from within and not from without, cannot doubt the indestructibility of his own being. He will understand, rather, that although when he dies the objective world, with the medium through which it presents itself, the intellect, will be lost to him, his existence will not be affected by it; for there has been as much reality within him as without.

From Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"

Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at ‘em very often. We all know that something is eternal. Arid it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars ...

Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.

You know as well as I do that the dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth ... and the ambitions they had ... and the pleasures they had ... and the things they suffered ... and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that's the way I put it…weaned away.”

- Narrator’s monologue from Act III of “Our Town”, by Thornton Wilder