By: William Saroyan“When you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”― William SaroyanIn the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches
By: Erik RittenberryArt: Pawel Kuczynski"Man has achieved his present position by being the most aggressive and enterprising creature on earth. And now he has created a comfortable civilization, he faces an unexpected problem... The comfortable life lowers man's resistance, so that he sinks into an
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!—Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf was a literary force, a mind both brilliant and fragile, living perpetually on the edge of psychic unrest. Despite the inner turbulence, she produced a vast body of work while engaging in an active an
I like grit. I like love and death. I'm tired of irony.Photo: Getty Images“The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth.” —Jim HarrisonJim Harrison, the great poet and renowned writer of Legends of
By living his own life in his own "eccentric" way, Thoreau demonstrated the futility and absurdity of the life of the (so-called) masses. It was a deep, rich life which yielded him the maximum of contentment. In the bare necessities he found adequate means for the enjoyment of life. — Henry MillerI
By: Erik Rittenberry"I think of myself in the oral tradition--as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of a campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered--as a storyteller.” —Louis L’AmourThoreau once famously said, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not st
By: Alejandra Pizarnikcaption...Night, the night again, the magisterial wisdom of the dark. The warm brush of death—a moment of ecstasy for me, heir to every forbidden garden.Footsteps and voices from the shadowy corners of the garden. Laughter inside the walls. Don’t believe they’re alive. Don’t be
By: Erik Rittenberry“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” ― Tom WaitsIf you write for applause, admiration, or the hollow idol of approval, your words are already dead. They will emerge stillborn, devoid of blood and pulse, a brittle facade of pu
By: Erik Rittenberry“Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”― Jack KerouacIt’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday. He was born on this day in 1922 i
By: Erik Rittenberry“We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.” — Charles BukowskiThe great Los Angeles poet Charles Bukowski died of leukemia on this day in 1994. In honor of the anniversary of
By: David WhyteMorning, Interior by Maximilien Luce, 1890Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIn that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began,
By: Fernando PessoaPhoto: Erik RittenberryThe only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness. —Fernando PessoaI wander aimlessly through the quiet streets, I walk until my body is as tired as my soul, until I feel that familiar pain that revels in being felt, a maternal compassion for oneself, set to
By: Kenneth Patchen“Art is not to throw light but to be light...”― Kenneth PatchenText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSo it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame To extend all boundaries To fog them in right over the plate To kill only what i
By: Stanley Kunitz"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains..." -- Walt WhitmanYears ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all
Every creative act strives towards the transcendent, towards passing beyond the borders of the given world. The creative act is always liberation and conquest. It is an experience of power. In essence, creativity is a way out, an exodus; it is victory.—Nicholas BerdyaevIt is only in the creative act
Art: Steven Outram“Not enough has been said of the value of a life lived alone, in that it is lived in a house with an open door, with room for the stranger, for the new friend to be taken in and cherished.” ~ May SartonThe fact that a middle-aged, single woman, without any vestige of family left, l
By: Erik RittenberryA hermit is one who renounces the world of fragments that he may enjoy the world wholly and without interruption.—Khalil GibranThe locals know him as “River Dave.”He was a man who simply walked away from the trifling world of comfort and culture and into the womb of the natural w
By: Erik RittenberryPhoto: Jason MartiniStuck with appearances, we keep espousing an incomplete wisdom, half-fantasy and half-foolishness. — Emil CioranEvery now and then, when the world seems unimaginably absurd, I’ll sit alone in a quiet room at night with a glass of red and pick up a book by the
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” ― Bertrand RussellSubscribe nowThe Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follo
By: Theodore RoethkeArt: Maksymilian Novák ZemplińskiI wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?I hear my being dance from ear to ear.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so
