We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me nowis a beginning or an end.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
The heart is a foreign country whose language none of us is good at.
I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.
Once she said the world was an astonishing animal: light was its spirit and noise was its mind. That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, ‘What is the sound of the waterfall?’ ‘Silence,’ he finally told me.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboatcomes slowly out and then goes back is truly worthall the years of sorrow that are to come.
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
Imagine if suffering were real.Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.What if the midget or the girl with one armreally felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would beto live if some people werealone and afraid all their lives.
We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.
I had lived all of my youthful dreams, but I couldn’t think of many adult ones. I finally realized that we don’t have many dreams for adults because, historically, people have always died much younger than they do today.