“Man is a restless creature, nomadic at heart. We all seek new experiences, and that’s the way it should be. Somehow it’s easier for the male animal to do it than the female, but if you remain truthful to yourself you’ll soon find that you are a nomad too. Don’t settle down, darling; your home is where you are.”
— Tash Aw, Map of the Invisible World (via hours)
“He knows what it is to seek. He knows the dryness. He has felt the thirst you get in a strange land — horrible, persistent — the thirst that lasts your whole life. “
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth (via hours)
Sun and Moon
by: Olive Senior
from: Gardening in the Tropics
Moon’s
desire
to play
with
fire
caused
Sun
to run.
Let’s
pray
they
stay
that
way.
“Samad saw clearly that he wanted her more than any woman he had met in the past ten years. Just like that. Desire didn’t even bother casing the joint, checking whether the neighbours were in — desire just kicked down the door and made himself at home.”
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
“I have been thinking how the body
is a vulture—all avarice and need.
How longing creeps up, stalking
for days, catches with such force
it leaves you breathless.
It doesn’t matter witnesses remain
offering explanation.”
— Carol V. Davis, “Need,” Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg (via proustitute)
“One doesn’t need to love in order to desire. And more than that, one doesn’t have to have a need in order to desire: that’s the logic of capitalism and pornography. Love presumes a need, a felt need to fill the chasms in the self.”
— Kevin Hart, John Kinsella interviews Kevin Hart, John Kinsella (via discourseoflove)
“[Spiritual love and physical desire are] not separate, they’re part of the same world. To be sure, there’s evidence of a dualism in my writing. It’s a deeply engrained Western habit of perception; but eros is the best image we have of agape.”
— Kevin Hart, John Kinsella interviews Kevin Hart, John Kinsella
“The erotic and the mystical are no strangers: each is a tempest; each drowns the individual in the yearn and success of combination; each calls us forth from an ordinary life to a new measure.”
— Mary Oliver, “Some Thoughts on Whitman,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (via hours)
“Said the poet Robert Frost, ‘We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes,’ It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that the child himself is real, and cherished.”
— Mary Oliver, “The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe’s Dream of Recapturing the Impossible,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (via discourseoflove)
“Of appetite—of my own appetite—I recognize this: it flashes up, quicker than thought; it cannot be exiled; it can be held on leash, but only barely. Once, on an October day, as I was crossing a field, a red-tailed hawk rattled up from the ground. In the grass lay a pheasant, its breast already opened, only a little of the red, felt-like meat stripped away. It simply flew into my mind—that the pheasant, thus discovered, was to be my dinner! I swear, I felt the sweet prick of luck! Only secondly did I interrupt myself, and glance at the hawk, and walk on. Good for me! But I know how sparkling was the push of my own appetite. I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same.
Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man’s most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sister Turtle,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
