A door just opened on a street--
I, lost, was passing by--
An instant's width of warmth disclosed
And wealth, and company.

The door as sudden shut, and I,
I, lost, was passing by,--
Lost doubly, but by contrast most,
Enlightening misery.
-- Emily Dickinson

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
-- Tennyson, "Charge of the Lightbrigade"

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak // To the earnest love

-- "Mowing," Robert Frost

You may hear more of it in the weekend write up, but I sat down on my Adventure Korea bus yesterday morning and was clearly amused. To my right a girl was one-fourth from the end of Breaking Dawn, and to my left was a man who had just turned to the titled page of Chapter Ten in Twilight. I felt beholden by the universe to follow the trend, and ( Read more... )

1. I take a perverse pleasure in having characters who speak somehow other than plainly. Especially people with large vocabularies or courtly fancies. People who talk in riddles, or by some other design that is normal/human. But this morning, especially those people with vocabularies that mean I can actually use mine ( Read more... )

So tired waiting for the end to come
Fully dead already but forever young
Hello, my dearest father it’s your favorite son
There’s some things that I’m regretting

I am destroyer I am lover,
I am destroyer I am lover.
I love one thing, destroy the other.

-- Star's Death to Death

The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain

-- "Little Boy Lost," William Blake