❧: found in writing
♖: found in life
✩: favorites
| * | log date | content | source |
|---|---|---|---|
| ❧ | 2026 | Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on the burning deck." Love's the son stood stammering elocution while the poor ship in flames went down. Love's the obstinate boy, the ship, even the swimming sailors, who would like a schoolroom platform, too, or an excuse to stay on deck. And love's the burning boy. |
elizabeth bishop |
| ❧ | 2026 | We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light. | hildegard von bingen |
| ❧ | 2026 | HORNS EVERYWHERE, not hard pointy protrusions from heads, but trumpets and saxophones and trombones, shoved in closets, stuffed under beds, buried in the yard, hidden horns, tubas and French ones, a whole gigantic marching band, one that used to be louder than bulldozers, louder than jets, louder than Aunt Catherine after three margaritas (no salt), a single euphonium seen from an upstairs window gave it away, authorities alerted, neighbors notified, hushed horns at the house on Hillcrest, oh, I wish I had been there at their unveiling, removed one by one, silent brass, saved from danger, work of madmen. | jeffrey letterly |
| ❧ | 2026 | No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. | david foster wallace |
| ❧✩ | 2026 | You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. | james baldwin |
| ❧ | 2026 | Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Keep the faith. Do the work.
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming. |
cheryl strayed |
| ❧ | 2026 | I have led a toothless life, he thought. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on--and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. | jean-paul sartre |
| ❧ | 2025 | 'DOES THE END JUSTIFY THE MEANS?'
this is process, there is no end, there are only means, each one had better justify itself. To whom? |
diane di prima |
| ❧ | 2025 | ...you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your night-mare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. | joan didion, on writing as a hostile act |
| ❧ | 2025 | You feel depressed and crazy because in every historical human culture known to anthropology, people sang together, danced together, and ate food together, and you don't sing and you don't dance and you eat alone in the dark.... You are a singing ape and you are meant to know fifty dances by heart, which hilltops are sacred, and the names of every plant it is possible to eat. | jay lesoleil |
| ❧ | 2025 | Rise up, then. Mend your ways, start seeing what you are instead of calculating what you should become. | kafka |
| ❧ | 2025 | IF YOU'RE NOT PLANNING ON GOING TO HEAVEN, GO TO NORWAY
Which is my taxi driver's way of saying, Marvel while you are on Earth. We do not know what awaits us hereafter. |
d. coffyn |
| ❧ | 2025 | I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witty banter flowed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me--but I came away, indeed that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth's orbit---------------------------------wanting to shoot myself. | kierkegaard |
| ❧ | 2025 | And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. |
raymond carver |
| ❧ | 2025 | It's you still. You who says, Look! You who points to the sky. You who tilts my chin toward the heron, who cups the minnow in your hands, who spots the deer miles ahead, who dulls the world with your absence. You who says, Look! & when I look, you are gone, replaced by the whitetail's hind legs, fading into the bush. | hieu minh nguyen |
| ❧ | 2025 | And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason. | ms howe |
| ❧ | 2025 | I value the fact that English has two parallel vocabularies--the Germanic vocabulary and the Latinate vocabulary. For example, we have the word undersea, and then we have submarine. Or underground and subterranean, all-powerful and omnipotent. So we can shift registers. We can say something in a very plain, blunt, Anglo-Saxon way, like "I will not do that"--all Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Or we can say it in a fancier, more distant, abstract, Latinate way, like "I prefer not to permit myself to approach such a notion." Or, in a passage of plain Anglo-Saxon, you can throw in one Latinate word, unexpectedly, to great effect. | lydia dais |
| ❧ | 2025 | no-one has the life they want. life can be good, sure, but hunger comes for everyone. I've never had a meal so good I was satisfied for longer than a day. poem while i wait for my friends to come and kill this dying day with me, poem vhile i wait for dying on a killing day, killing while I wait to die, dying while my friends are killing time. poem while i wait, this American body, this American boredom, this American poem, this American time I have to kill. poem while i kill, poem for the life i want, already dead, poem while the lives i want bleed out, beside the road, mile markers on a hungry interstate. | june gehringer |
| ❧ | 2025 | However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is... You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this. | henry david thoreau |
| ❧ | 2025 | There's a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty Thousand years. Sometimes it's a girl. This child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like: "Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk." You live with this child, but you don't know it. You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy At night. He's uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas. Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you. |
robert bly |
| ❧ | 2025 | Who can read the world? Its paragraphs of cloud and alphabets of dust. Just now a night bird outside my window made a single, plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees. Not, I'm sure, that it was meant for me. | danusha lameris |
| ❧ | 2025 | There is no almanac for the living--a pulse flies and then stops. You are pain pinned to muscle--also grasses, breath, tree-dawns, and gears. You are dark arteries of quiet, the white heat smashed through deserts and levers and coasts--that flickering pause between thoughts. More even than your own life, you flow from what is. The stars swept into stillness, the ground drinking rain. You are the whole shape of sound. Whether or not you sing. | joanna klink |
| ❧ | 2025 | How lucky we are that you can't sell a poem, that it has no value. Might as well give it away. That poem you love, that saved your life, wasn't it given to you? | gregory orr |
| ❧ | 2025 | There is a heartbreaking beauty about my crummy street tonight, at 2 o'clock in the first snow: I stand looking out at this window, I think how everything seen is something seen for the last time. At last I turn away, I give up. I am tired, I can't mourn anymore the loss of what I never asked for and never understood. | franz wright |
| ❧✩ | 2025 | First, you must realize you're homesick for all the lives you're not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead, find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a view. Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep going. Watch a purple meadow quiver. Get still. Pet trail dogs. Buy the hat. Run out of gas. Befriend strangers. Knight yourself every morning for your newborn courage. Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whiskey beside a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray to something unnameable. Fall for someone impractical. Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands. Bear beauty for as long as you are able and if you spot a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself--joy is not a trick. | j. sullivan |
| ❧ | 2025 | O, clever tender hands that stitch up needing skin--I am a wound & you stitch me whole again. | keaton st james |
| ❧ | 2025 | Depravity begins with thinking of love as a radical act. I quit loving with difficulty. I love easy now. Two parakeets on my shoulders. They'll fly away if I move. So I move. I love flight. I love cages left wide open. I am not a window. I could be a window. Open me, you'll find a dense wood, children wandering inside it. Not lost children. They know the way. They live the way horses run. If they each had a bird in hand they would open their hands. | todd dillard |
| ❧ | 2025 | Desire loves the what if, the if only, the maybe in another lifetime. She loves a parallel universe. Or seven. Meaning knows it minerals, knows which volcanic magma belongs to which volcanic fleet. Knows the earth has parents. That a person is raised. It's the real flirtation, to say, you are not a meal. To say, I want you to last. | megan fernandes |
| ❧ | 2025 | Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. | zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance |
| ❧ | 2025 | There was a guy who was a great wingshot on a quail hunt in Georgia. He killed everything he saw, he dropped 'em all morning. One of the other guys said, "You're the best wingshot I've ever seen." At lunch the guy asked him, "Do you shoot with one eye open or both?" He paused and thought about it. Finally, he said, "I don't know." | cormac mccarthy, on the unconscious in his writing |
| ❧ | 2025 | On my twenty-fifth birthday, when I had lived one quarter of a century, I was nearly dead, almost catatonic, without the will to live. By my twenty-sixth birthday, I wanted more than anything to live. I was one year old, an infant born out of a corpse, still with the smell of death on her, but hating death. | andrea dworkin |
| ❧ | 2025 | "How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, "When you can no longer make a fist." |
naomi shihab nye |
| ❧ | 2025 | Sometimes, you just want something so hard you have to lie about it, so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute, how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once told me gannets, those voracious sea birds of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie. Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die. | ada limon |
| ❧ | 2025 | Leaving again. If I didn't care, I wouldn't be grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me, like this room I lived in for eleven days, how I learned the way the sun laid its palm over the side window in the morning, heavy light, how I'll never be held in that hand again. | minnie bruce pratt |
| ❧ | 2025 | which is a way of saying: I accept. I would root with you in imaginary stands. Cheer at the same time in a darkened bar. We are more alike than not, us two. Here, let me shift, shuffle. Shelter a moment beneath this wing. | j. sullivan |
| ❧ | 2025 | The reason people want M.F.A.'s, take workshops with fancy names when all you can really learn is a few techniques, typing instructions and somebody else's mannerisms is that every artist lacks a license to hang on the wall like your optician, your vet proving you may be a clumsy sadist whose fillings fall into the stew but you're certified a dentist. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. | marge piercy |
| ❧ | 2025 | To be alive: not just the carcass but the spark. That's crudely put, but... If we're not supposed to dance, why all this music? | gregory orr |
| ❧ | 2025 | Understand that there is a beast within you that can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink til it is satisfied. | frank bidart |
| ❧ | 2025 | I've got nothing to say to you, but it's to you I want to say this nothing. | roland barthes, on love letters |
| ❧ | 2025 | Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn't know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn't get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn't make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Bronte were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.
So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that's who I am. I am the generic he, as in, "If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state," or "A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on." That's me, the writer, him. I am a man. |
ursula k. le guin |
| ❧ | 2025 | i trace my fingers through the bloodstream of childhood and look back on the tainted memories ; that was pretty bad, wasn't it? but it would make a good movie scene. | ? |
| ❧ | 2025 | There's a condescending tone I hear when people say "Writing is so therapeutic! How wonderful that you could take your pain and make something out of it!" But writing isn't therapy. Painting isn't therapy. Music isn't therapy. Living well is therapy. We've taken the arts out of living, and now we only leak them back when people tell us we're sick. It's almost impossible to convince anyone that you can make something when you're healthy, or just because you want to. | richard siken |
| ❧ | 2025 | I am not afraid. I was born to do this. | joan of arc |
| ❧ | 2025 | I always imagined I would write a book, if only a small one, that would carry one away, into a realm that could not be measured nor even remembered.
I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I'd be good. I'd dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth and undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail. |
patti smith |
| ❧ | 2025 | Make some room for yourself, human animal. Even a dog jostles about on his master's lap to improve his position. And when he needs space he runs forward, without paying attention to commands or calls. If you didn't manage to receive freedom as a gift, demand it as courageously as bread and meat. Make some room for yourself, human pride and dignity. The Czech writer Hrabal said: I have as much freedom as I take. | julia hartwig |
| ❧ | 2025 | And I understood that if I kept it all up... no one would know me. A dim light far in the distance? No. To love -- I had to be there. I had to be there to be loved. | marie howe |
| ❧ | 2025 | look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn't! | anne boyer |
| ❧ | 2025 | Always falling into a hole, then saying "ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole," getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying "ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole," getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying "this is not your grave, get out of the hole"; | anne boyer |
| ❧ | 2025 | I exist. In thousands of agonies--I exist. I'm tormented on the rack--but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar--I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there. | dostoevsky |
| ❧ | 2025 | Ring the bell that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. It's how the light gets in. | leonard cohen |
| ❧✩ | 2025 | Oof. Never wanting to feel bad is like never wanting to feel hungry or anything other than the perfect temperature: your body will betray you every second of every day. There's no moral. Suffering is just information. You need a sandwich because you need a sandwich. You need love because you need love. When you trust yourself to eat gorgeously you can stand to be hungry for a few hours before dinner. When you trust yourself to love beautifully you can stand the ups and downs of intimacy. | ask polly |
| ❧ | 2025 | There is no statute of limitations on starting over. Re-invent yourself every day. Be the girl who walks barefoot and listens to the blues. Tomorrow, wear a trench coat and speak fierce truths. Be a phoenix. Be ashes. Burn down. Resurrect. Let go of the idea that you must always be who you have always been. | pinterest comment |
| ❧ | 2025 | It's impossible to be lonely when you're zesting an orange. Scrape the soft rind once and the whole room fills with fruit. Look around: you have more than enough. Always have. You just didn't notice until now. | amy schmidt |
| ❧ | 2025 | Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. | maggie smith |
| ❧ | 2025 | In retrospect I can see that you gave me very little and I tried to build an entire future with it. You must understand, I had never been remembered like that, before. With purpose. Without begging for it. I took what I was offered and ran. | caitlin conlon |
| ❧ | 2025 | I know the impossibility of the hickey, whose urge is not ultimately to mark or to be marked, but to possess and be possessed. I cannot render anything precisely in words, as I cannot crush my lover's body inside of mine. All I can do is leave a mark--the notation of my effort, a symbol for the thing. That is the endless pleasure and frustration of the writer and the lover: to reach and reach and never become. | melissa febos |
| ❧ | 2025 | to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it | ellen bass |
| ❧ | 2025 | i suppose i do love this life, in spite of my clenched fist. | andrea gibson |
| ❧ | 2025 | i'll live my life if it kills me | e.e. cummings |
| ❧ | 2025 | You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it. | clive barker |
| ❧ | 2025 | If I am killed for simply living, let death be kinder than man. | althea davis |
| ❧✩ | 2025 | At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much, more than they can stomach, but the appetite doesn't converse much with the stomach. Everyone is hungry and not only for food--for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them. | catherynne valente |
| ♖ | 2025 | Qui vult finem, vult etiam media (he who desires the end, desires the means) | |
| ♖ | 2025 | Proud parent of a FUCKING skeleton army | bumper sticker |
| ♖ | 2025 | Having good health simply means dying at the slowest possible rate. | sign in a bar bathroom i saw after a funeral |
| ❧ | 2025 | There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; And be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine disatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others. | martha graham |
| ❧ | 2025 | Loving something with a different makeup than your own was akin to eternal idolatry. | your forma |
| ❧ | 2025 | A power claimed and thrice carried out is true; The proving makes it so. | naomi novik |
| ❧ | 2025 | Do not whine. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. | joan didion |
| ❧ | 2024 | The map is not the territory. | proverb |
| ❧ | 2024 | The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope. | walter benjamin |
| ❧ | 2024 | If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it. | chekhov |
| ❧ | 2024 | You can't heal if you don't eat. | apothecary diaries |
| ❧ | 2024 | For a moment I was tempted to love a lie. | lilith |
| ❧ | 2024 | Eating is, quite simply, the exclusive privilege of the living. | dunmeshi |
| ❧ | 2024 | Be--don't try to become. | osho |
| ❧ | 2024 | He who loves, sees. | lilith |
| ❧ | 2024 | I saw that a man alone is but a being that may become a man--that he is but a need, and therefore a possibility. | lilith |
| ❧ | 2024 | Writers use everything. We can't help it. Whatever touches us touches our writing. | octavia butler, parable of the sower preface |
| ❧ | 2024 | That's it, I guess. Just go on living, whether you feel like it or not. | chekhov |
| ❧ | 2024 | The world is not beautiful; Therefore it is. | kino's journey |
| ❧ | 2024 | Rejection is the name of the game. If I fail more than you do, I win. | writing advice |
| ❧✩ | 2024 | I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; If I refuse to satiate them, they infect the whole soul. | sartre |
| ♖ | 2024 | None of us are getting out of this alive. | bio professor |
| ❧✩ | 2024 | But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything | charles darwin |
| ❧ | 2024 | I am awesome, and I can't do everything. | making motherhood work |
| ❧ | 2024 | Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence. | last telegrams |
| ❧ | 2024 | What hath god wrought? | last telegrams |
| ♖ | 2023 | IT'S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN | wonderfair banner |
| ♖ | 2023 | LEAVE SOONER, DRIVE SLOWER | road sign |
| ♖ | 2023 | Don't you even think about quitting! Your breakthrough is coming. | church sign |
| ♖ | 2023 | if you can't convince them, confuse them | store sign |
| ♖ | 2023 | LIVE FREE: FAKE YOUR DEATH | t-shirt |
| ♖ | 2023 | stop being skinny and tired | 50s weight gain ad?? |
| ♖ | 2023 | no gamble no future | t-shirt |
| ❧ | 2023 | There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my piracy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. | j.d. salinger |
| ❧ | 2023 | Just remember you are telling your stories. Don't apologize for them. They are yours. Own them. | zine book |
| ❧ | 2023 | You don't get to choose the people who need your help. | mitm |
| ❧ | 2023 | It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. | sherlock holmes |
| ❧ | 2023 | There's nothing more optimistic than planting a garden, because you're making a bet that you're going to be there at harvest time. | stephen ritz |
| ❧ | 2023 | "I don't want to die," I say finally. "I never did. I like life." "Me too," he says. "Seems a bit obvious, doesn't it?" "Not always." |
all our hidden gifts |
| ❧ | 2023 | Wherever you go, there you are. And you bring yourself with you. | stephen ritz |
| ❧ | 2023 | We are not history yet. We are happening now. How miraculous is that? | wtnv |
| ❧ | 2023 | ESTELLE: But we're going to--to hurt each other. You said it yourself. INEZ: Do I look as if I wanted to hurt you? ESTELLE: One can never tell. INEZ: Much more likely you'll hurt me. Still, what does it matter? If I've got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands. Sit down. Come closer. Closer. |
no exit (sartre) |
| ❧ | 2023 | It is not down on any map: the true places never are. | herman melville epigraph |
| ❧ | 2023 | If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything. | zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance |
| ❧ | 2023 | The Buddha... resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha--which is to demean oneself. | zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance |
| ❧ | 2022 | You can't pin joy like a moth. | tweet |
| cat | word | definition |
|---|---|---|
| n | accidia | sloth |
| phrase | a fortiori | a conclusion reached with stronger reason than a previously reached conclusion; inferred from earlier argument |
| n | agita | anxiety, stress, or aggravation |
| v | ameliorate | make something bad better; improve |
| n | anathema | something which one vehemently dislikes |
| adj | apocryphal | pf doubtful authenticity, but widely believed |
| n | apogee | the highest point in development; a climax on culmination |
| n | aporia | unsolvable philosophical puzzle; paradox |
| adj | aporetic | of or relating to aporia; in rhetoric, expressing doubt |
| n | asperity | harshness of tone or manner |
| adj | auto didact | a person who learns or has learned without formal education; self-taught |
| v | capitulate | to cease resisting; surrender |
| n | catechism | a summary of (religious/christian) principles and doctrines in the form of questions and answers |
| n | chicanery | the use of trickery for political/financial/legal gain |
| adj | caustic | able to burn or corrode organic tissue; scalding and biter |
| n | cambist | a person who exchanges foreign values of money |
| adj | cervine | deer-like |
| n | cogitation | the action of deep thinking/contemplation |
| n | concatenation | a series of interconnected things/events |
| adj | concomitant | naturally accompanying/associated |
| adv | concomitantly | simultaneously--at the same time |
| n | contretemps | a minor dispute/disagreement; an unexpected and unfortunate occurence |
| adj | copacetic | in good order |
| adj | corpulent | fat |
| phrase | cosa mentale | a matter of the mind |
| n | deign | do something beneath one's dignity |
| adj | deleterious | causing harm/damage |
| v | deliquesce | become liquid - applied to organic matter during decomposition |
| n | demiurge | creator, craftsman - God |
| phrase | de rigueur | required by etiqquette or current fashion |
| n | dialectic | the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions; reasoning through dialogue |
| adj | didactic | intended to teach; moral instruction as ulterior motive; teaching in a patronizing way |
| adj | ecumenical | related to christian churches; christian unity |
| n | elocution | the skill of clear and expression speech; distinct pronunciation and articulation; a particular style of speaking |
| n | erudition | scholarship; quality of having or showing good knowledge |
| phrase | esprit de corps | a feeling of pride, fellowship, and common loyalty in a group |
| n | eunoia | good will; well mind; beautiful thinking |
| phrase | ex nihilo | out of nothing |
| adj | extant | still in existence; surviving |
| adj | factious | related or inclined to a state of faction; divided, sectarian |
| adj | garrulous | excessively talkative on trivial matters |
| phrase | hic Rhodus, hic salta | lit: Here is rhodes, jump here! proverb: prove what you can do, here and now |
| phrase | in actu | in the act; reality |
| n | insouciance | lack of concern; indifferent; nonchalant |
| adj | internecine | destructive to both sides of a conflict |
| phrase | in toto | as a whole |
| n | invigilator | exam proctor (british) |
| adj | irreverent | lacking respect for things usually taken seriously |
| n | joculator | jester, minstrel, "person who does funny little things" |
| n | lacuna | an unfilled space; a gap; a missing portion of a manuscript |
| n | libation | alcoholic drink poured in offering for deity |
| n | locum | a person who temporarily stands in for someone in the same profession |
| adj | loquacious | talkative |
| n | maven | an expert, a connoisseur |
| n | mendicant | one who relies on charity/alms to survive; usually a member of a religious group, like a monk |
| n | mien | a person's look or manner, aspect, "vibe" |
| phrase | mise en abyme | image within itself; art copied within art. "placed into abyss" |
| n | morass | muddy, boggy ground; a complicated or confused situation |
| n | obsolescence | the process of becoming obsolete |
| n | ossuary | a box for bones |
| v | palliate | make less severe or unpleasant, without removing the cause |
| n | parity | equality, especially of status or pay. of a number, the fact of being even or odd. |
| n | parlay | gambling previous winnings for a greater payout |
| n | parsimony | extreme unwillingness to spend money or use resources |
| n | pastiche | imitation, derivitave work |
| adj | percipient | having a good understanding of things; perceptive |
| v | percolate | filter, spread, penetrate; become lively |
| n | perdition | damnation, eternal punishment for sin |
| adj/n | peripatetic | traveling from place to place--or one who does so |
| n | pettifoggery | a quarrel about petty points |
| adj | picaresque | an episodic style of fiction with a rough and dishonest but appealing hero |
| n | pith | spongy white tissue lining citris; the essence of something |
| adj | prescient | prophetic; having or showing knowledge of events before they take place |
| n | precis | a summary/abstract of text or speech |
| phrase | prima facie | on first impression; accepted until disproven |
| n | pseudocide | the act of faking one's death by suicide |
| n | repast | a meal |
| n | ressentiment | a psychological state arising from supposed envy and hatred which cannot be acted upon |
| adj | sartorial | of or relating to clothing/fashion (sartor: tailor) |
| adj/n | soporific | inducing drowsiness/sleep; a drug that induces drowsiness/sleep |
| adj | quotidian | of or occuring every day; daily; ordinary, mundane |
| n | rectitude | righteousness; morally correct behavior/thinking |
| adj | reticent | not revealing one's thoughts or feelings readily |
| n | rhizome | an underground stem with many roots and shoots |
| adj | sardonic | grimly mocking or cynical |
| n | scaramouch | a boastful but cowardly person (commedia dell'arte archetype) |
| n | sepulcher | a small room or monument in which a dead person is laid |
| n | solecism | a grammatical mistake; an incorrect behavior |
| n | sophistry | the use of fallacious arguments for deception |
| adj | spurious | false, fake; an argument which is not as sound as it appears |
| adj | stalwart | loyal, reliable, hardworking |
| phrase | sui generis | unique; in a class of its own |
| n | syllogism | deductive reasoning wherein two separate premises come together to form new knowledge |
| adj | temerity | boldness, audacity, excessive confidence |
| adj | transpicous | transparent; easily understood, lucid |
| n | usury | illegal lending of money at unreasonable interest |
| phrase | vae victus | woe to the vanquished |
| n | verisimilitude | the appearance of being true or real |
| n | verve | vigor and spirit or enthusiasm |
| n | whoosah | a feeling of calm or peace |