A pen went scribbling along. When it tried to write love, it broke.

WONDER WITHOUT WILLPOWER

Love’s way becomes a pen sometimes writing g-sounds like gold or r-sounds

like tomorrow in different calligraphy
styles sliding by, darkening the paper

Now it’s held upside down, now beside
the head, now down and on to something

else, figuring. One sentence saves
an illustrious man from disaster, but

fame does not matter to the split tongue
of a pen. Hippocrates knows how the cure

must go. His pen does not. This one
I am calling pen, or sometimes flag,

has no mind. You, the pen, are most sanely
insane. You cannot be spoken of rationally.

Opposites are drawn into your presence but
not to be resolved. You are not whole

or ever complete. You are the wonder
without willpower going where you want.

I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw — the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can't I say that, Willy?

I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Obviously, nothing new has happened in a manner of speaking. This morning, at a quarter past eight, as I was leaving the Hôtel Printania to go to the library, I tried to pick up a piece of paper lying on the ground and didn't succeed. That's all, and it isn't even an event. Yes, but, to tell the whole truth, it made a profound impression on me: it occurred to me that I was no longer free.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works.

There are pens and pencils. Pens are permanent, so if you make a mistake with a pen, you can't go back. But if you make a mistake with a pencil, you can just go back and erase your mistake. So, in a way life are like pens. Because if you make a mistake in the past, you can't simply erase that mistake. Unlike pencils, which have erasers. Unless, if you have a pen that has an eraser.”

“…And that eraser is called Jesus Christ.

"One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty")"

oh, that was a terrible time for me, I can tell you. I kept the blinds drawn down over both my windows. When I peeped out, I saw the sun shining as if nothing had happened. I could not understand it. I saw people going along the street, laughing and talking about indifferent things. I could not understand it. It seemed to me that the whole of existence must be at a standstill — as if under an eclipse.