More than Words

Just before the year moves on I read through all the notes, quotations, and marginalia that I copied into notebooks, fly leafs, and book margins. 

“ Every memoirist is with Proust, in search of lost time.”

“ The memoirist writes, above all else, to redeem experience, to reawaken the past, and to find its pattern, better yet, he writes to discover behind bygone events, a dramatic explanatory narrative.”

       Sven Birkerts

...on listening to Dylan Thomas reading in his passionate voice—

“ Not a conspiracy of silence, but a participatory silence, a community collaboration in letting him let the word loose aloud.”

“ The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.”

       Rebecca Solnit

“A frontier has two sides. it is an interface, a threshold, a luminal site, with all the danger and promise of liminality.”

       Ursula K.Le Guin

Water flows over these hands

May I use them skillfully

as I construct and shape the day

      Thich Nhat Hanh 

“If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can be to his reader.”

      Flannery. O’Connor

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—only then—is it handed to you.”

     Annie Dillard

“Lying is done with words, but also with silence.”

     Adrienne Rich

“Faith is God’s call to see His trace in the face of another.”

      Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

“...in Gaelic there is explicit recognition that the divine is present in others. This presence is recognized in an old saying  —The hand of the stranger is the hand of God.”

“Poets are people who become utterly dedicated to the threshold where silence and language meet.”

“ All words come out of silence. The language of poetry issues from and returns to silence.”

       John O’Donohue

“For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river.”

      18th century Urdu poet Ghalib

“I look at whomever is nearest me so that I may see in that person, for the moment, Christ.”

    Madeline L’Engle

“I balance the wind on the stem of my canoe...”

       Erik Reese

“If you want to build a ship...don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

      Antoine de Saint Exupery

“ Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”

      Nadine Gordimer

“No story begins where it seems to begin; the roots of the tree are hidden from the eye, but they reach down to the waters.”

       Stefan Heym

“ Writing is a form of prayer—writing is to bear witness.”

      Tsering

And I’ll end off transcribing with this Jerry Garcia quote... “What a long strange trip it has been.”