It Is All An Illusion (which Is Nothing Against It, For Illusions Are The Most Valuable And Nessecary

thinking about Kait Rokowski writing, "nothing ever ends poetically, it ends and we turn it into poetry. all that blood was never once beautiful. it was just red." and losing it

Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

The collective life that was manifested in war, worship, the forum, knew no division between what was characteristic of these places and operations, and the arts that brought color, grace, and dignity, into them.

- John Dewey, Art as Experience

Portrait Bust of a Woman (detail), Roman, Antonine Period, 140-150 AD

Photo by Erika Dufour

“There is only now; and no matter how this war came about, no matter how it is run, it belongs to us. ‘Because I am involved in mankind’. And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”

— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add me to the sum of her.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

the precise sound of a flower bud

- Ross Gay, Weeping

the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed.

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

You never refuse. You simply don't speak.

Alicja Rybałko, A Prayer for the Forbidden Fruit tr. Regina Grol