ancientsorrow

“God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
― Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August

“People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability of suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror, and nothing but horror.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality