is, was

The Country Wife (Dana Gioia)

She makes her way through the dark trees
down to the lake to be alone
following their voices on the breeze
she makes her way. Through the dark trees
the distant stars are all she sees.
They cannot light the way she’s gone.
She makes her way through the dark trees
down to the lake to be alone.

The night reflected on the lake
the fire of stars changed into water.
She cannot see the winds that break
the night reflected on the lake
but knows they motion for her sake.
These are the choices they have brought her:
the night reflected on the lake
the fire of stars changed into water.

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils…

—The Malleus Maleficarum (1484)

On account of the fact, he said gentlemanly, that I have at all times purposely refrained from an exhaustive exercise of my faculty of vision and my power of optical inspection (I refer now to things perfectly palpable and discernible—the coming of dawn across the mountains is one example and the curious conduct of owls and bats in strong moonlight is another), I had expected (foolishly, perhaps) that I should be able to see quite clearly things that are normally not visible at all as a compensation for my sparing inspection of the visible.

—Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream… Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you should not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Errol Morris, on the “wilderness of error”

There’s a Supreme Court case about involuntary commitment, O’Connor v. Donaldson, and the man at the center of it, Kenneth Donaldson, wrote a book about being involuntarily committed for 20 years. He keeps going back to this expression: “Give a dog a bad name and you might as well kill it.” I always took that to mean that once you label something in a certain way, an infernal logic takes over. There’s very little you can do about it. Once you label someone crazy, or once you label somebody guilty, usually you can find evidence to support that a priori conclusion…

In general, evidence never speaks for itself, in spite of all the doctrine that says it does. Evidence always becomes part of an argument, a narrative.

(from here)