Category: Quotations

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Henri J.M Nouwen

Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.

― Henri J.M. Nouwen

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Hélène Cixous — The Vale of Soul-Making

I have flowed, become stagnant, festered, I have fallen from above. Mass, rhythmic, in harmony with my millions of drops, I have rained. I have been earth with the earths. Foaming, humid, I have slept a faceless face down. I have. Had. Lived. Done. Been. All the words that grow before the tip of the tongue, before I reach it. I am a body who has enjoyed creation.

— Hélène Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism). Published by Columbia University Press; 1 edition (November 6, 2008)

Hélène Cixous — The Vale of Soul-Making
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Julia Kristeva — The Vale of Soul-Making

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.

— Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. (Columbia University Press; Reprint edition April 15, 1982)

Julia Kristeva — The Vale of Soul-Making
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On Boredom

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let Yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the English language, is to exact full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves scrutiny is that it represents pure undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

– Joseph Brodsky in On Grief and Reason.

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“You’ve nothing else to give the world which no one else can give except yourself” – Quentin Crisp