A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
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
I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea. (New Directions Publishing Corporation January 1, 1975) Originally published 1938.
And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History. (Vintage (April 13, 2004) Originally published 1992.
Donna Tartt — The Vale of Soul-Making
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
― Charles Bukowski, from “the crunch,” Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977. (Ecco; Ecco edition May 31, 2002) Originally published 1977.
Charles Bukowski — The Vale of Soul-Making
I keep on thinking.
If I sit here for long enough,
A line, one true line,
Will rise like some miraculous fish to the surface,
Brilliant and lithe in the late sunlight,
And offer itself into my hands.
I keep thinking that as the weeks go by,
and the waters never change
— Charles Wright, from “21,” Littlefoot: A Poem (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007)
Charles Wright — The Vale of Soul-Making
Two English Poems
I
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-
corner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves
laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with
things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals,
of things half given away, half withheld,
of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act
that way, I tell you.
[…]
Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. — Henry Miller
Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.
― H. Rider Haggard, She (Oxford University Press, October 22, 1998). Originally published 1887.
H. Rider Haggard — The Vale of Soul-Making
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all…I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, […]
Eugène Ionesco — The Vale of Soul-Making
But don’t leave me, delicate mind!
Don’t let me go crazy.
Sweet wounded reason, don’t
leave me now.
Don’t leave me. Let me die, without fear,
a clean lovely death, like Empedocles, who smiled as he fell
into the crater.”
— Miklós Radnóti, “Maybe …,” Clouded Sky. ( Sheep Meadow; Revised edition August 1, 2003)
Miklós Radnóti — The Vale of Soul-Making
Naked Cities Journal 
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