The collection / 31 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

I do not fully understand the way of human beings. They are a curious and remarkable tribe altogether. They are capable of anything. I know that much. They are a constant surprise to me. They are a constant surprise to themselves also. They appear to live in a state of constant amazement. This makes them refreshing and infuriating. But there is a greatness about them sometimes. More perhaps than they know. Or a capacity for greatness. More than they know. It’s confusing but I know this to be true. I have learned that much in all these years.

Brian Doyle / quote

02Undated

Maturity turns out to be a question you can never answer with confidence, despite advanced age and wage.

Brian Doyle / quote

03Undated

Some women have a pulsing energy almost too sharp and salty to endure and when they are in pain their pain is ferocious and shatters all over the place.

Brian Doyle / quote

04Undated

If everything must be burned I will do the burning and so I will not be burnt but be the fire. Everything I ever loved burned and so I will be the burning. There is nothing but that must which be burnt. Women will burn and children burn and houses burn so I will be nothing that can burn. I will be the fire. The fire has no home. The fire goes where it wants. The fire arrives and departs and none can account the meaning of its travels. Everything I ever touched burned.

Brian Doyle / quote

05Undated

Rained gently last night, just enough to wash the town clean, and then today a clean crisp fat spring day, the air redolent, the kind of green minty succulent air you'd bottle if you could and snort greedily on bleak, wet January evenings when the streetlights hzzzt on at four in the afternoon and all existence seems hopeless and sad.

Brian Doyle / quote

06Undated

Well the sky always seemed like another ocean to me, you know? Like we live between two incredible oceans, and we'll never get to the bottom of either of them.

Brian Doyle / quote

07Undated

We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.

Brian Doyle / quote