“What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present, connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward into a void. Memory depends on void, as void depends on memory, to think it. Once void is thought, it can be cancelled. Once memory is thought, it can be commodified.”
— Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost

''I think no one saves us in this world, but people give us the tools so that we can transform towards our own rescue. And I think that is true of poems. We write them, and they're good enough, and then we let them go. Part of the act of writing is, is abandonment.''

Ocean Vuong in interview with The Louisiana Channel.

“The memory has entered your mind, but it must be ‘discovered.’ It will emerge in dreams, or when you are awake, when you turn the pages of a book, or turn a corner. Don’t be impatient; don’t invent recollections. Chance in its mysterious workings may help you along, or it may hold you back. As I gradually forget, you will remember. I cannot tell you how long the process will take.”

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

∆ Virginia Woolf, from The Waves

There is nothing more revolutionary but to see the sick and love the sick, to feel the wound and be aware of its existence and what feeds it and to love others as strong as your infection. No longer repressed one is open to Love, to the giving process that is encounter. There is no longer the mask of productivity, of functionality, all that’s left are the fragile open fissures of chronic suffering. – Freda Epum