"Willfulness is a strange optimist. It turns the inevitable into the desirable. If aloneness is inevitable, I want to believe that aloneness is what I have desired because it is happiness itself. It must be a miscomprehension—though I have been unwilling to give it up—that one's life could be lived as a series of solitary moments. In between, time spent with other people is the time to prepare for their disappearance. That there is an opposite perspective I can only understand theoretically. The time line is also a repetition of one's lapse into isolation. It's not others who vanish, but from others one vanishes."

-Yiyun Li,  Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

"I did not know what I was doing, and what I also did not know, facing my computer screen and a white wall, slowly turning pale, was that I was becoming a writer. Becoming a writer was partly a matter of acquiring technique, but it was just as importantly a matter of the spirit and a habit of the mind. It was the willingness to sit in that chair for thousands of hours, receiving only occasional and minor recognition, enduring the grief of writing in the belief that somehow, despite my ignorance, something transformative was taking place.  

It was an act of faith, and faith would not be faith if it was not hard, if it was not a test, if it was not an act of willful ignorance, of believing in something that can neither be predicted nor proved by any scientific metric.

...

At a time in which the demand for productivity and the measuring of outputs has increased in the university — indeed, everywhere — it is important to acknowledge how much of what is crucial in the work that matters to us, no matter what our field, can neither be quantified nor accelerated."

-Viet Thanh Nguyen, "In Praise of Doubt & Uselessness"

They say the universe is expanding,

not staying in one place.

I, though, have a small rental room

somewhere in it.

-Bill Knotts, "Poem"

And he woke up alone in the other world     and he was
walking down a familiar street      and it had been raining
all night       and the boughs of the trees were black and heavy
and the first cars of the morning passed       with their tires hissing
over the blacktop        and under his feet he felt the pavement
slither         a carpet of petals battered down by the raindrops
and each puddle swirled with a slick of green-gold pollen
and though he couldn't remember how or when it happened
his heart had been spilled        and at its quick was planted a wet
seed that he'd never known before          and it was spring


-Craig Arnold, "Hymn to Persephone"

"Myth deals in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances."

-Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman