The Ones with Difficult Names

But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

- Franz Kafka

I'm looking for the face I had before the world was made.

- William Butler Yeats



the rest of my days I spend

wandering: wondering

what, anyway,

was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

- Galway Kinnell