Franz Wright, from "The Window"

“…Can I ask you a question? Those moths in November, where are they now, do you think? You remember. We’d see them each evening around three in the afternoon; first a few, then a bucketful, and all at once millions, everywhere. The cold arrived, the cold that really means it, and they were gone. They simply vanished, the way we all do in the end, but what does that mean? What does it mean, to say “Where are they?” Where are we? We change, all right; but where else, strange fellow moths, is there to go but the world? I saw the first trillions of snowflakes today as the light was beginning to change, to darken, blowing and swirling across the bare back fields and back roads. Like you and I, they did as they were told. To things already here, we were called forth and asked to join them, asked to live. Not forever, not even very long. But we are called forth, we are brought here, and we are not brought here to die. I’ve been looking at Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child, for the first time since I was nineteen. The girl is sitting up in bed, a green blanket pulled up to her waist, the mother seated facelessly beside her to the left; her left hand and the child’s are clasped, knitted together, like the spot where a broken bone was healed. Then there is the child’s thinning hair, the poor skull showing through the sparse wisps of it: it makes you think of an infant’s, the little continents of bone still closing. Hair the color of the red wine in the half-full glass that’s glowing on a table in the foreground, in the half-light. Her head is turned sharply to the left, her line of sight passing right over the woman’s bowed head in the direction of some unseen source of light—I always thought it was a window, but who’s to say it’s not a mirror. I see that now. Face beaming or reflecting from the depths of resignation, with a small exhausted smile of utmost sweetness, an unmistakable expression of gladness toward the outer world, the sight of things exactly as they are, and expressing the sum of all knowledge regarding that world: it is still there…”

- Franz Wright, from “The Window”, in Kindertotenwald

Coronation Cross

“…The back of the cross is adorned with words from the last sermon of St. David, the patron saint of Wales, in Welsh: "Byddwch lawen. Cadwch y ffydd. Gwnewch y pethau bychain," translating to: ‘Be joyful. Keep the faith. Do the little things.’”

From "Tender is the Night"

“…His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war’s ending—in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself—there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved—so easy to be loved—so hard to love.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Easter

“In the old days, on Easter night, the Russian peasants used to carry the blessed fire home from church. The light would scatter and travel in all directions through the darkness, and the desolation of the night would be pierced and dispelled as lamps came on in the windows of the farmhouses one by one.”

- Thomas Merton

On the sadness of Easter, from "Crossroads"

Into Russ’s throat came the sadness of life’s brevity, the sadness of the sunless hour, the sadness of Easter. God was telling him very clearly what to do. He had to stay in Many Farms, where Keith had lived since 1960, so he could visit Keith and keep an eye on Perry. In light of Keith’s condition, his wish to enjoy sex with a person not Marion seemed even more trivial, and he’d been insane to imagine it happening in Arizona. He’d let himself forget how bleak the reservation was in late winter, how demanding it was to lead a work camp. 

And yet, when he thought of doing God’s will, at the cost of his week with Frances on the mesa, he felt unbearably sorry for himself. It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier. 

- Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads