Jiwon > Jiwon's Quotes

“I AM ROWING (a hex poem)

i have cursed your forehead, your belly, your life
i have cursed the streets your steps plod through
the things your hands touch
i have cursed the inside of your dreams

i have placed a puddle in your eye so that you cant see anymore
an insect in your ear so that you cant hear anymore
a sponge in your brain so that you cant understand
anymore

i have frozen you in the soul of your body
iced you in the depths of your life
the air you breathe suffocates you
the air you breathe has the air of a cellar
is an air that has already been exhaled
been puffed out by hyenas

the dung of this air is something no one can breathe
your skin is damp all over
your skin sweats out waters of great fear
your armpits reak far and wide of the crypt

animals drop dead as you pass
dogs howl at night their heads raised toward your house
you cant run away
you cant muster the strength of an ant to the tip of your feet

your fatigue makes a lead stump in your body
your fatigue is a long caravan
your fatigue stretches out to the country of nan
your fatigue is inexpressible

your mouth bites you
your nails scratch you
no longer yours, your wife
no longer yours, your brother
the sole of his foot bitten by an angry snake

someone has slobbered on your descendents
someone has drooled in the mouth of your laughing little girl
someone has walked by slobbering all over the face of your domain

the world moves away from you

i am rowing

i am rowing

i am rowing against your life

i am rowing

i split into countless rowers
to row more strongly against you

you fall into blurriness
you are out of breath
you get tired before the slightest effort

i row

i row

i row

you go off drunk tied to the tail of a mule
drunkenness like a huge umbrella that darkens the sky
and assembles the flies

dizzy drunkenness of the semicircular canals
unnoticed beginnings of hemiplegia

drunkeness no longer leaves you
lays you out to the left
lays you out to the right
lays you out on the stony ground of the path

i row
i row
i am rowing against your days

you enter the house of suffering

i row
i row

on a black blinfold your life is unfolding
on the great white eye of a one eyed horse
your future is unrolling

I AM ROWING”
― Henri Michaux

“He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels.”
― Henri Michaux, Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.”
― John Joseph Powell, The Secret of Staying in Love

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Don't be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“Accept yourself, love yourself, and keep moving forward. If you want to fly, you have to give up what weighs you down.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
― Seneca

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.”
― Margaret Drabble

“Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.”
― Rumi Jalalud-Din

“It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”
― Lao-Tzu

“For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, 'Mama, am I a Palestinian?' When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then - silence. Afterwards...I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you...I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child...Do you believe that man grows? No, he is born suddenly - a word, a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road.”
― Ghassan Kanafani