patron saint of desire

"I'm afraid of life! There are times I-I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding–this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... if instead of fearing it and running from it, one could... get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self—ceases. I don't know how to say it. But i b…

“She found those rooms horrible too and would rather be somewhere else, but she was not sure where. If she did know where she would rather be, life would be better and everything would seem much more bearable.” — Natalia Ginzburg, Family and Borghesia

“I’m sending you hugs and wish you happiness, if there is such a thing as happiness. A possibility that we can’t entirely exclude, despite so rarely seeing evidence of it in this world that’s been given to us.” — Natalia Ginzburg, Happiness, as Such

“How is she going to mature? She’s already old. She’s a withered old seedling. She was born withered.“ — Natalia Ginzburg, Happiness, as Such

“I have pictured everything with great exactness down to the smallest details. And when one sees the things of the future so clearly as though they were already happening, it is a sign that they should never happen. They have already happened in a sense in our minds, and it is really not possible to experience them further.” — Natalia Ginzburg, Voices in the Evening

Faithfulness to reality is a kind of love, a student said to me recently, but Ginzburg’s characters are almost entirely faithless, ruthlessly devoted to dreams. — Cynthia Zarin, Introduction to Valentino and Sagittarius

I felt… unbelievably tired. Tired to the point where I could no longer protect myself from reality. — Gary Indiana, Rent Boy

Beyond the train was some sort of primordial substance, protoplasm, the very apeiron or ‘boundlessness’ which the ancient Greeks posited as the first principle and element of all existence, and which they feared. Indeed, the boundless whole, the indeterminate, the irrational and unpredictable, can assume any form. But the form – or peras – that it takes depends on human beings, and therein lies the possibility of sal…

“This injustice, these things lacking in me to be him and lacking in him to be me, gave me a sharp feeling of our being, he and I, two incomplete creatures hiding, diffident and ashamed, behind that soup bowl.” — Italo Calvino, A Goatherd At Luncheon

“I desire you so much that the first time I take you in my arms I think I’ll tear you to pieces, rip off your clothes, roll on top of you, do anything to give vent to this infinite desire to kiss you, hold you, possess you.” — Italo Calvino’s letters to Elsa de’ Giorgi

Only a way out—to the right or left or anywhere at all. I made no other demands, even if the way out should be only an illusion. The demand was small; the disappointment would not be any greater—to move on further, to move on further! Only not to stand still with arms raised, pressed again a crate wall. — Franz Kafka, A Report for An Academy

In all of them, however, there was only one feeling: no way out. Nowadays, of course, I can portray those ape-like feelings only with human words and, as a result, I misrepresent them. — Franz Kafka, A Report for An Academy