I need silence

like you who read with thought

not aloud

the sound of my own voice

would now be noise

not words but just annoying sound

that distracts me from thinking.

I need silence

I go out and on the street the same people

who know my gab

disoriented by my quick hello

who knows, they probably think I’m in a hurry.

But I just need silence

I’ve spoken so much, too much

the time be silent has come

to pick up thoughts

happy, sad, sweet, sour,

there are many inside us all.

True friends, few, one?

they know how to listen even to silence

they know how to wait, understand.

Who from me has had many words

and who doesn’t want any anymore

needs, like me, silence.

– Alda Merini –

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.

– Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea

Ph : Andrey Izosimov

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.

– Julio Cortázar –

When you remember me, it means you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

– Frederick Buechner –

Ph : Carter Smith

Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin.

It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

– Frederick Buechner –

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

– Frederick Buechner – A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

I can not not love you.

You do not know why, and I can not tell you, and in spite of that your face, the shadow you threw on the web of my thoughts is the only happiness I have ever had in the world.

– Mihai Eminescu –

Ph : Hiroshi Nonami