quotes from Spoon River (part 1)

It must have been about this time last year - I used my public transit commute to voraciously read a number of books I'd been meaning to get around to. I also meant to write thoughts and reviews about those books - but unfortunately for my personal documented history - that was when I wasn't really writing. I have been meaning since then to recover the quotes I recorded from whatever notebook I was writing in at the time.

I might as well start with the quotes scrawled on the envelope I just found on my desk.
These are taken from their larger context, but read these quotes as you would read the inscription on a headstone in a graveyard grown heavy with generations.



George Gray

To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture of restlessness and vague desire -
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.



Mary McNeely

Passer by,
To love is to find your own soul
Through the soul of the beloved one



Ernest Hyde

For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,
A birth with gains and losses.
The mind sees the world as a thing apart,
and the soul makes the world at one with itself.
A mirror scratched reflects no image -
And this is the silence of wisdom.



Ezra Bartlett

... only when after many trials for strength,
Only when all stimulants fail,
Does the aspiring soul
By its own sheer power
Find the divine
By resting on itself