– “Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man’s recognition of his own negative potential–with his sense of what he is capable of.”
Joseph Brodsky, “On Grief and Reason”
– “Tragedy is like strong acid–it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”
D.H. Lawrence, letter to James T. Boulton (April 1, 1911)
– “Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.”
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Presumption”
– “The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.”
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
– May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly we walk through this April’s day”