From the NY Times review of The Clean House

“There are things, big invisible things, that come unannounced — they walk in, and we have to give way."

The chilly silence that follows this explanation is broken by Matilde, ready with her usual remedy: “Would anybody like to hear a joke?”

Of course it’s told in Portuguese, so you probably won’t get it. But this peculiarity epitomizes a fundamental message of Ms. Ruhl’s odd and enchanting play: We may never come to a full understanding of the jokes life plays, but the wisest and possibly noblest response is to have a good laugh anyway.

by Charles Isherwood

The Goodbye Drive

We are driven
by endings as by hunger. We must know
how it comes out, the shape o' the whole.

A. S. Byatt

Getting There, Hell and High Water

"[The] path to knowledge [is] a kind of madness. I'm interested in the route that people must take to arrive at a spot where they can be large and whole and responsive. And the kind of forbearance that we need to show each other because sometimes people can be doing things that seems really crazy and nonsensical, but when you look back at it, this was the path that they had to take, there was no other way to get there."

Scott Spencer in Crafting Scenes

Pointe Vierge

“A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”

Albert Camus

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow, or a friend.