To cross the border beyond

Having been blown away
by a book
I am in the gutter
at the end of the street
in little pieces
like the alphabet

-Mary Ruefle, from "White Buttons" as found in Trances of the Blast
Title: Octavio Paz, The Double Flame
Image: Trinity Site explosion, 0.016 seconds after explosion, July 16, 1945

In what distant deeps

    I wanted to live among books.

-Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
Image: Kerry Mansfield
Title: William Blake, from “The Tyger”

Both eager and afraid to fall in

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, L’Agneau Mystique (The Ghent Altarpiece), 1432
Title: Rainer Maria Rilke, from Early Journals

They would rather be trees

There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries.

-Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

Image: Érik Desmazières for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, 2000
Title: Margaret Atwood, Men With the Heads of Eagles

What is hidden by what we see

walking through the forest
I rearrange
the trees

-Paul Reps

Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1933
Title: Réné Magritte

Come, young rain of tears

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
-Ernest Hemingway


Image: Alexis Arnold, Crystalized books
Title:  Rolf Jacobsen

There is no Frigate like a Book

“You live several lives while reading.” 
 

-William Styron


Image: Thomas Dibdin, Bibliomania, or, Book-madness : a bibliographical romance, 1842
Title: Em Dickinson

Trying to Find the Door

    A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page… And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about.

-Gerald Murnane, Inland

Image: Chad Wys, from the series The Critique of Gesture
Title: Nod to Adam Fuss

Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin

"And though recently all his living with books had put his head rather in the clouds and made him less and less interested in the world around him, now on the other hand reading the Encyclopedia, and beautiful words like Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin, made him rediscover everything around him as if seeing it for the first time."

-Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Image: Isaac Eddy and James Wilson, history from 4000 BC - 1813 AD

The Poet & Nonrecognition

-Giorgio Agamben, Profanations