“We don’t know a tenth of what there is to know,” Mr. Pendergast said. “Why we don’t even know a sixth.”
― Robert Morgan, quote from Gap Creek
“There is a smell that lung sickness gives people. It’s the smell of blood and congestion and fever. It’s the smell of blood mixed with air that hangs over a bed and fills a sickroom. It’s the smell of old blood, and blood that is fresh and already old. It’s the smell of a festering wound.”
― Robert Morgan, quote from Gap Creek
“The good Lord made the world so we could earn our joy, Ma said. But it's no guarantee we'll ever be happy.”
― Robert Morgan, quote from Gap Creek
“As I scrubbed the floor I was scrubbing part of the world. And I was scrubbing my mind to make it clear. It was work that made me think clear, and it was work that made me humble. I could never talk fast, and I could never say what I meant to people, or tell them what they meant to me. My tongue was loosened by my feelings. It was with my hands and with my back and shoulders that I could say how I felt. I had to talk with my arms and my strong hands.”
― Robert Morgan, quote from Gap Creek
“I discovered hunger don’t make you resentful. Hunger makes you slow and brooding, like you are just waiting and waiting. You don’t feel like going anywhere or doing anything. Hunger makes you set around, makes you want to go to bed early and sleep late. You don’t want to think about nothing, for if you think you will think about good things to eat. When you’re hungry you don’t want to think at all. You want time to pass. You are waiting for something to happen. You don’t want to waste effort. You are saving the fat on your bones and the strength in your blood. You are saving your breath. When you’re hungry you don’t even daydream a lot. You just drift through the hours and the first thing you know another day is over, another night has gone by. Mostly you want to forget.”
― Robert Morgan, quote from Gap Creek
“There's no hope for a family that quarrels all the time.”
― Robert Morgan, quote from Gap Creek
Robert Morgan
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“Tragedy is an imitation not just of a complete action, but of events that evoke pity and fear.”
― Aristotle, quote from Poetics
“Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls. Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, not fenced off, integral to that All. [...] Then it was as if One voice sounded. One word was uttered and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing; now we are become a dual thing, no longer that which we were at first, dormant, and in a sense no longer present.”
― Plotinus, quote from The Enneads
“The world is always in a hurry, but I teach My children patience. Live, expecting a full and joyous life. And learn to trust My perfect timing so that you may discover that all the pain found in waiting has a magnificent and awesome purpose.”
― Eric Ludy, quote from When God Writes Your Love Story
“In all that ever mattered, you are unchanged. Old? Yes, we must all grow old. Age is nothing but the sum of life. And you are alive, and back with me here. By the great God of heaven, I have you back with me. What should I fear now?”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“The Dying Man"
in memoriam W.B. Yeats
1. His words
I heard a dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
“My soul’s hung out to dry,
Like a fresh salted skin;
I doubt I’ll use it again.
“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose
I know, as the dying know
Eternity is Now.
“A man sees, as he dies,
Death’s possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing.
2. What Now?
Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hand turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.
Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instant ages on.
I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.
In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What’s beating at the gate?
Who’s come can wait.
3. The Wall
A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.
Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep and image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures our of obscure shadow rave,
All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave.
The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun.
4. The Exulting
Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.
Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.
All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying with my death.
5. They Sing, They Sing
All women loved dance in a dying light–
The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon!
Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one,
Then settles back to shade and the long night.
A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn,
And that cry takes me back where I was born.
Who thought love but a motion in the mind?
Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing?
I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing;
Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend.
I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.
I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone:
What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!–
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am.
The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”
― Theodore Roethke, quote from The Collected Poems
Me and Mr. Darcy
Darkest Mercy
Blood Feud
The Code of the Woos...
If You Find Me
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