House of Fortitude

- Arkaye Kierulf / Autobiography

1.

You could say I grew up in a rough neighborhood: We owned boxing gloves. The red ones I loved, which represented fire and strength. I loved how they looked on me. It was rough because my uncle who lived next door was a blackbelter, and we were born with fists. My brother would wear black gloves and my uncle would be the referee of the two of us. When the fighting went on, we would hide love the best way we could. Everyday it was morning. The chickens my other uncle owned — he also ...

- Tomi Adegbayibi / Black Bird

There's a black bird. Pour the rum, the
cage won't hold. We've tipped centre
continent on tongues. Stutter, conditions
of nerves. We are saying bye bye, sugbon
me ti mo itumo dudu ninu wa. Clip the
wings of mercury. Calcify the song of she
in burnt ethanol. Everything is spilling.
Play this game. No bird at all. Sing with
me... Bye bye black.... cold answers no.
A Retrograde is moving inside spines bent.
Spy me this. Arch me this. Come me this.
Censored purge...

- Frances Hodgson Burnett / The Secret Garden

"

In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the n...

- Hernan Diaz / In the Distance

“A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love. The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature’s unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life stands for the entire natural kingdom. Examined with attention, the dissected hare illuminates the parts and properties of all other animals and, by extension, their environment. The hare, like a blade o...

- Boris Pasternak / Doctor Zhivago

“But, first, the idea of social betterment as it is understood since the October revolution doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm. Second, it is so far from being put into practice, and the mere talk about it has cost such a sea of blood, that I’m not sure that the end justifies the means. And last—and this is the main thing —when I hear people speak of reshaping life it makes me lose my self-control and I fall into despair.

“Reshaping life! People who can say that have never unde...

- Ezra Pound / Hugh Selwyn Mauberly [excerpt]

I

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old scene. Wrong from the start--

No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half-savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;

[idmen gar toi pant, hos eni Troiei]
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held hi...

- Anna Akhmatova / The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn's approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven't faded yet.

In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.

But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,
From her shining head they will flutter
And fall—and before her
They will die, faintly fragrant still.

And, impelled by faithful longing,
My obedien...

- Vladimir Nabokov / Pale Fire

“Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel...

- Arkaye Kierulf / Spaces

1.

In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.

2.

Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She is in love with Peter. I am in love with her.

3.

Stand on the floor whe...

- Mark Z Danielewski / House of Leaves

“Two kisses in one kiss was all it took, a comfort, a warmth, perhaps temporary, perhaps false, but reassuring nonetheless, and mine, and theirs, ours, all three of us giggling, insane giggles and laughter with still more kisses on the way, and I remember a brief instant then, out of the blue, when I suddenly glimpsed my own father, a rare but oddly peaceful recollection, as if he actually approved of my play in the way he himself had always laughed and played, great updrafts of light, burn...

- Albert Camus / The Rebel

“Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering wo...

- Alice Notley / Millions of Us

"Purportedly a chain of civilians, soldiers, voices

lice they were called. It is sometimes sufficient to beg

Lice creeping over one, kill them with a chemical;

then there are lice-ghosts everywhere. Glints of pearly

nails. The light of my beloved will keep me from noticing.

Trailer to keep her in; he asked me if I knew her ‘auction name.’

Walked over the scorch; what are values when there’s nothing here?

The wing of a dead soul grows into all th...

- Stanley Kunitz / The Collected Poems

“The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.<...

- Arkaye Kierulf / Textbook Statistics

On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die.
So we’re ahead by 3.22, which is good, I think.

The average person will spend two weeks in his life
waiting for the traffic light to change.

Pubescent girls wait two to four years
for the tender lumps under their nipples to grow.

So the average adult has over 1,460 dreams a year,
laughs 15 times a day. Children, 385 more times.

So the average male adult mates 2,580 times with five different people 2025-03-02 11:02:23 +0000 UTC View Post

- Vladimir Nabokov / Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

"My purpose in writing my Texture of Time, a difficult, delectable and blessed work, a work which I am about to place on the dawning desk of the still-absent reader, is to purify my own notion of Time. I wish to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse, for I do not believe that its essence can be reduced to itslapse. I wish to caress Time.

One can be a lover of Space and its possibilities: take, for example, speed, the smoothness and sword-swish of speed; the aquiline glory of ruling...

- Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards wit...

- Mary Gaitskill / Veronica

“We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass, blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don’t even know what it is, or what it’s for. Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listenin...

- Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

"

[Silence]

 FIRST VOICE (Very softly)

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,
courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night
in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat
there in the muffled middle b...

- Mary Gaitskill / Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays

“But I think that this apparent desire to be a victim cloaks an opposing dread: that Americans are in truth profoundly, neurotically terrified of being victims, ever, in any way. This fear is conceivably one reason we initiated the particularly vicious and gratuitous Iraq war―because Americans can't tolerate feeling like victims, even briefly. I think it is the reason that every boob with a hangnail has been clogging the courts and haunting talk shows across the land for the last twenty y...

- Aja Monet / My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter

“The ghosts of women once girls

Somewhere a little girl is reading aloud
in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles
at the sound of her own voice escaping
the spine of the book. she feeds her hunger
to know herself. She has not yet been taught
to dim, she sits with the stars beneath her feet,
a constellation of things to come.
as if a swallowed moon, she glimmers.
Her head wrap rolls out in a gutter, bare feet
scat the earth, the ghosts of wo...

- Alice Notley / Perhaps Not For You

There is

no

audience

because

there is

no audience.

So if you speak only to

imagined beings

what does "only" mean?

--------------------------

This building formerly a restaurant . . .

this small room has been scraped of its paint 

and denuded of most former furniture: but 

also it has grown in size—can a building be 

enticed to grow? Because it is now as big as an 

airplane hangar. 2025-02-26 08:33:47 +0000 UTC View Post

- Vladimir Nabokov / Pale Fire

“Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel...

Winter 2024/2025 (BTS)

- Chuck Palahniuk / Fight Club

"Everything in heaven is quiet, rubber-soled shoes.
I can sleep in heaven.

People write to me in heaven and tell me I'm remembered. That I'm their hero. I'll get better.
The angels here are the Old Testament kind, legions and lieutenants, a heavenly host who works in shifts, days, swing. Graveyard. They bring you your meals on a tray with a paper cup of meds. The Valley of the Dolls playset.

I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on...

- William Gaddis / The Recognitions

“How ... how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tr...

- Ocean Vuong / On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Tell me it was for the hunger

& nothing less. For hunger is to give

the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light

whittled down by another war

is all that pins my hand

to your chest.

i

You, drowning

between my arms —

stay.

You, pushing your body

into the river

only to be left

with yourself —

stay.

i

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiv...

- John Updike / Self-Consciousness

“Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to sugges...

- Albert Camus / The Rebel

“Meanwhile, the triumphant revolution, in the aberrations of its nihilism, menaces those who, in defiance of it, claim to maintain the existence of unity in totality. One of the implications of history today, and still more of the history of tomorrow, is the struggle between the artists and the new conquerors, between the witnesses to the creative revolution and the founders of the nihilist revolution. As to the outcome of the struggle, it is only possible to make inspired guesses. At least...

- Robert Louis Stevenson

“The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.”