Mute as amber

When we speak of solitaries, we always take too much for granted. We think people know what we are talking about. But they know absolutely nothing. 

-Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Art: Vilhelm Hammershoi, Baker's Shop, 1888 
Title: James Agee, excerpt from A Death in the Family

All books are the Book of Job

"Hence our loneliness; hence our desolation."
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Image: Ikko Narahara, Shadow of car driving through desert, Arizona, 1971
Title: Stanley Elkin

Open the book: the gilt, the edges, the pages, the fingertips...

"A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”  
-Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North 

Image: Michael Schlegel, Iceland
Title: adapted from Elizabeth Bishop

Music is the space between the notes

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
 

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Image: David Hurn, Cactus nursery, Arizona
Title: Claude Debussy

The past and the future pressing so hard on either side

My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.

-Clarice Lispector
 
Image: Kerry Murray, Penhas Douradas, Serra da Estrela
Title: Evelyn Waugh