x "Every word is changed when spoken."
— Stanley Moss, Poetry International Festival 1995, via Twitter

x "We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies."
— Roderick Thorp

x "I think people are often quite unaware of their inner selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards, losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best ways back into that. You are hypnotized as soon as you get into a book that particularly works for you, whether it’s fiction or a poem. You find that your defenses drop, and as soon as that happens, an imaginative reality can take over because you are no longer censoring your own perceptions, your own awareness of the world."
— Jeanette Winterson
(via leopoldgursky)

x "We’re here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all."
— Jeanette Winterson, from Lighthousekeeping
(Source: thechocolatebrigade, via cynicismbedamned)

x "The greatest things—let’s have an understanding—
are not confusing sensuality with passion,
of love with fulfilment,
of heaven with possibility; the greatest things
are about belonging to what you have no command over—
sunsets, tears, and the face that is dearest;
love is about being killed when you lack the inclination."
— Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, from The Honeymoon Wilderness, with thanks to ahuntersheart

x "I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more."
— Maurice Sendak, who has died at the age of 83

x "

I have cultivated several personalities within myself. I constantly cultivate personalities. Each of my dreams, immediately after I dream it, is incarnated into another person, who then goes on to dream it, and I stop.

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.

"
— Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet, translated by Alfred MacAdam, with thanks to anhypnic; and this, respectively

Interviewer: … You said that language and the power of imagination were the same thing. What did you mean by that?

Böll: That behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined. Actually, every word has a great burden of memories, not only just of one person but of all mankind. Take a word such as bread, or war; take a word such as chair, or bed or Heaven. Behind every word is a whole world. I’m afraid that most people use words as something to throw away without sensing the burden that lies in a word. Of course, that is what is significant about poetry, or the lyric, in which this can be brought about more intensively than in prose, although prose has the same function.

(with thanks to theparisreview)

x "For a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in the world to be lost… Not til we are lost… do we begin to find ourselves."
— Henry David Thoreau, from Walden