House of Fortitude

- Ocean Vuong / On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Maybe in the next life we'll meet each other for the first time- believing in everything but the harm we're capable of. Maybe we'll be the opposite of buffaloes. We'll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple.

Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will...

- Henry Miller / Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion I

"To be sick, to be neurotic, if you like, is to ask for guarantees. The neurotic is the flounder that lies on the bed of the river, securely settled in the mud, waiting to be speared. For him death is the only certainty, and the dread of that grim certainty immobilizes him in a living death far more horrible than the one he i...

- John Steinbeck / The Grapes of Wrath

"The Western land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western states, nervous as horses before a thunderstorm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxe...

- Anis Mojgani / Cradle

"Set the warriors to sea in a ship stacked with shields, layers of swords, mountains of gold. Lay them out with their wife. With their child. Lay them out with their livestock, with the whole farm. The rain is not coming here. Not today. For today the gods welcome one of their own back home. So set the hero out on the soft wa...

- William Gaddis / The Recognitions

“The painter knows, sadly enough, that experience does not suffice unto itself, has no proportion, dimension, perspective, mournfully he eats his life but is not allowed to digest it, this being reserved for others, not knowing, but who must somehow, at any sacrifice be made to know, then punished for the sight of this know...

- William Gaddis / J R

“You see I still have confidence in you sir, or should I say the artist who dwells within you, the artist who disdains such mundane details as selecting a fresh shirt in the morning, who steps forth into the workday world the rest of us inhabit indifferent to the glances he draws because his shoes fail to match, why? Becaus...

- Kahlil Gibran / The Prophet (on pleasure)

Then a hermit, who visited the city once a year, came forth and said, Speak to us of Pleasure.

And he answered, saying:

Pleasure is a freedom-song,

But it is not freedom.

It is the blossoming of your desires,

But it is not their fruit.

It is a depth calling unto a ...

- Kahlil Gibran / The Prophet (on beauty)

"And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.

And he answered:

Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?

And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?

The aggrieved and the injured say, “Beauty...

- William Gaddis / The Recognitions

“It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but ...

- Agnes Callard / Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming

"When one makes a radical life change, one does not submit oneself to be changed by some transformative event or object; one’s agency runs all the way through to the endpoint. The nature of that agency, as I shall argue, is one of learning: coming to acquire the value means learning to see the world in a new way. But this, ...

- Hernan Diaz / In the Distance

“Corrupting, there, forsaken, becoming, already, nothing.
"And thy corpse shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall frighten them away to think that this is one of God's most terrible curses. But consider it carefully.
No sepulchre. No cremation. No obsequies. Becoming...

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

"Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simp...

- Hernan Diaz / Trust

“Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it. They doubt their right to hold someone else accountable for their happiness; they worry that their loved...

- John Steinbeck / The Grapes of Wrath

“Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and he strong,...

- Hernan Diaz / In the Distance

“A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love. The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature’s unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life stands for the entire natural kin...

- Ted Chiang / Liking What You See: A Documentary

"Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purity it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks...

- André Breton / Freedom of Love (L'union libre)

"My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongu...

- Albert Camus / The Rebel

“Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It ...

- Madeleine L'Engle / A Ring of Endless Light

"The earth will never be the same again

Rock, water, tree, iron, share this grief

As distant stars participate in the pain.

A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,

A dolphin death, O this particular loss

A Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried

If this small ...

- Ted Chiang / Exhalation

“I wish you well, explorer, but I wonder: Does the same fate that befell me await you? I can only imagine that it must, that the tendency toward equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes. Perhaps that is just a limitation of my thinking, and your people have discovered a source of pre...

- Mark Z. Danielewski / House of Leaves

“With a little luck, you’ll dismiss this labor, react as Zampanò had hoped, call it needlessly complicated, pointlessly obtuse, prolix––your word––, ridiculously conceived, and you’ll believe all you’ve said, and then you’ll put it aside––though even here, just that one word, ‘aside’, makes me shudd...

- Alejandra Pizarnik / Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

“Paths of the mirror"

I
And above all else, to look with innocence. As if nothing was happening, which is true.

II
But you, I want to look at you until your face escapes from my fear like a bird from the sharp
edge of the night.

III
Like a girl made of pink chalk on a very old wall that is s...

- Octavia Butler / Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998)

The Book of the Living I

Earthseed is a religion inspired by the science fiction of Octavia Butler, specifically her books, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). Octavia Butler (1947-2006) was one of the first African-American science...

- Paul Auster / The Brooklyn Follies

“Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in every election. Ride your bike in the park. Dream about my perfect, golden body. Take your vitamins. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Pull for the Mets. Watch a lot of movies. Don’t work too hard at your job. Take a trip...

- Epictetus / Enchiridion

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You ...

- Henry Miller / The World of Sex

"Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or as heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil...

- Miguel de Cervantes / Don Quixote

Chapter I

Which treats of the character and pursuits of the famous gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler,...

- Henry Miller / SEXUS: THE ROSY CRUCIFIXION, BOOK I

“There is a theory that when a planet, like our earth for example, has manifested every form of life, when it has fulfilled itself to the point of exhaustion, it crumbles to bits and is dispersed like star dust throughout the universe. It does not roll on like a dead moon, but explodes, and in the space of a few minutes, th...

- Julian Barnes / A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

“The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip...

- H.P. Lovecraft / The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness

“But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beach...