“If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you’ll never enjoy the sunshine.”
–Morris L. West
love
Morning Trip (293)
“It’s too bad if a heart lacks fire, and is deprived of the light of a heart ablaze. The day on which you are without passionate love is the most wasted day of your life.”
–Omar Khayyam
Morning Trip (274)
“There are two kinds of silence, it seems to me. One is that place where we tuck out thoughts and feelings. You can betray in silence, brood in silence, envy, pity, plot, year, admire, condemn, lie to yourself, lie to your conscience, forgive yourself, forgive others, all in silence. Love. You can love in silence. You usually do.
Which leads to the second kind of silence, where you find yourself from time to time, surrounded by, engulfed in–that greater silence, to which all other silences run, when you realize that we are all part of the same poem, the same vast poem that began in the first cosmic spark and will end at the last amalgamation of the stars–a limerick, a sonnet, a fucking epic to which surrender becomes a kind of understanding. It’s as if sound, all sound, constituted an intrusion of people invented because they could not stand the overwhelming power of that silence.”
–Roger Rosenblatt, Thomas Murphy
Morning Trip (260)
“There is a witness who watches the obstreperous play of flame and eros and says, This is the dance of existence. A great mutual embrace is always happening between the eternal and what dies between essence and accident. We are all writing the book of love. All the particles of the world are in love and looking for lovers. Pieces of straw tremble in the presence of amber. Isn’t that the deal? We’re here to love each other, to deepen and unfold that capacity, to open the heart. And that means living in the witness, I’m beginning to see.”
–Coleman Barks
Morning Trip (259)
“Love has no claims. Love has no expectations. Most of us were raised to become prostitutes. We have the illusion that with good behavior, good grades, lot of awards, pretty clothes, nice smiles, we can buy love. How many ifs were you raised with? I love you if you make it through high school. I love you if you bring good grades home. Boy, would I love you if I could say my son is a doctor. You become a doctor or a lawyer, or whatever your parents never were able to become, with the illusion that they will love you more. Love can never be bought. There are people who spend their lives prostituting themselves, pleasing other people in the hope of getting love. They will shop the rest of their lives for it and they will never find it.”
–Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Morning Trip (251)
“Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird-filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.”
–Kenneth Rexroth, from When We With Sappho
Morning Trip (239)
“Advice to those about to acquire a Vermeer: Always look at it as it might appear in its average moments–not as it might glow in the light-dance of the fireplace, or burn from within on a fall Sunday morning when the amalgamation of the sun’s rays blasts red upon those fat dutch cheeks, or as you would make it glow when you return home flushed with the one victory or another, or with wine. None of that.
Rather think: What will this masterpiece look like at 2:45 on a February afternoon when you have run out of toilet paper and the roof leaks and a horse has just kicked in your kitchen door for the fun of it. And a dead badger is wedged high in the chimney, stinking up the house. Consider such moments as these, when you are about to acquire your Vermeer. But yes. She is as lovely as a Vermeer.”
–Roger Rosenblatt, The Book of Love
Morning Trip (221)
“Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it is a state of vulnerability.”
–J. Krishnamurti
Elisa's Spot 