By: Erik RittenberryIf we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with daring and profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny. — Rollo May“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind,” Virginia Woolf once wrote in
By: Manly P. HallArt: Laura Makabresku“To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.”—Many P. HallText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWe can only escape from the world
Every morning you have to conquer the demons who say, “This will never be any good. This will never be what I saw when I dreamed of it.” But you just have to say, “Keep on, keep on,” and finally it gets through. —May SartonI am at my desk from three to four hours every day…It has to be the morning,
By: Erik RittenberryPhoto: TONY NAHRAText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. --Ezra PoundText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFrom that brief spark in t
By: Erik Rittenberry“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity — activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for men… It is fateful and ironic how
By: Erik RittenberrySpring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. —Rainer Maria RilkeI packed light, as I always do—a camera, a journal, a few worn books—and left Florida behind, heading north until the pavement gave way to winding dirt roads that cut through meadows, mountains, a
Georgia O’Keeffe in the bedroom at Abiquiu. John Loengard / The LIFE Picture CollectionI've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. —Georgia O’KeeffeSubscribe nowBy the late 1920s, painter Georgia O’Keeffe was alread
"It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life."— D.H. LawrenceD.H. Lawrence, widely recognized for his novels, was also a poet deeply preoccupied with solitude, introspection, death, and humanity’s bond with nature. His time in northern New Mexico, pa
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
