Au moment même, on les prend pour des heures comme les autres et après coup seulement, on s’aperçoit que c’étaient des heures exceptionnelles, on s’acharne à en reconstituer le fil perdu, à en remettre bout à bout les minutes éparses. // Georges Simenon

`

I’m saying birds versus birds because that carries more meaning for an all-goose audience. // Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

`

It is dark. I have no life. // James Wright

`

Maybe I'm proposing that misogyny is a form of stupidity. Maybe it's stupid to hate women now. Maybe it wasn't always. Maybe there were several benefits in times before this, but that now it's a form of stupidity. // Claire Keegan

`

If I ever start a rueful subject in a letter to you—blow me! // John Keats

`

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

—Pablo Neruda

`

Your poetry's bad and you blame the news.
—Lana Del Rey

`

They have asked

the psychiatrists     psychologists     politicians and

social workers

What this decade will be

known for

There is no doubt        it is

loneliness

—Nikki Giovanni, 1978

`

".. a lot of the most famous white male painters, who are lifted up as the founders of abstraction, were looking to Indigenous art. They were collecting that art because they recognized the strength and the agency and the beauty and the expertise of that work."

// Dyani White Hawk

`

may we both be damned,

but may I be damned first, both blood and bones

if you beguile me more than once.

No more shall you, through your flattery,

get me to close my eyes and sing.

// Geoffrey Chaucer

`

Furthermore (concluding) America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good—an intensive sort of personal public-relations project.  There are times when I see this as idealism.  There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium.  With everyone sold on the good how does all the evil get done?

// Saul Bellow

`

Among Americans the list of useful idiots for the Irish Republican cause is long // Nick Laird

`

"All schools are bad and the one we attend is always the worst if it doesn’t open our eyes."

// Thomas Bernhard

`

"Beavers also bring a lot of positive opportunities to the city." // UBC report on Vancouver beavers and sustainability

`

«Έστρεψα καταπάνω μου τον θάνατο σαν υπερμέγεθες ηλιοτρόπιο»

— Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

`

Today, the family is a new queer nation-state, the thing to be positioned as the center of the culture, the civilizing force, the most important. As the writer Dudley Saunders told me: “We’re training our families that they are not part of a world, they don’t have responsibilities to others. That they are superior and trump all other human relationships. It’s almost like royalty. You train the family that only people within the structure exist. In this way the family structure is something that actually makes society impossible.”

// Sarah Schulman

`

“Beavers build their castle-like lodges in the middle of rivers. They have an extraordinary method of conveying and carting timber from the woods to the water, for they use other beavers as wagons. The beavers of one team309 gnaw down the branches, and then another group has the instinct to turn over on their backs and to hold this wood tightly against their bellies with their four feet. Each of these last grips a branch in its teeth which sticks out on either side. A third group holds tightly on to this cross-branch with its teeth and pulls the animal in question along backwards together with its load. Anyone who witnesses this manoeuvre cannot fail to be impressed.” 
― Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales & The Description of Wales

`

But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional

// Ta-Nehisi Coates

`

“Zoe, these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.” // David Wojnarowicz

`

"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us."

// James Baldwin

`

In the misogyny of these writers lies the deluded ancient dream of frightened men: if she is made less human, I will be made more human.

// Vivian Gornick

`

Summer is about the insects becoming crazy. // Celine Sciamma

`

“Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and know that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.” —Louise Erdrich

`

“Maybe an unexamined life is not worth living. But a man’s examined life can make him wish he was dead.”// Saul Bellow

Live with your century but do not be its creature. // Saul Bellow

`

I’m trying to  (to quote a great poet) get the fuck out of dodge. // Kendall Townend

`

"A baseball team is a bauble on a rich person’s key chain, not a measure of civic understanding of the game." --David McGimpsey

`

Men’s ideas, though, continue to run in the old channels about oysters as well as God and war and women.  // M.F.K. Fisher

`

“In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.” – Abbas Kiarostami

`

Sumner almost smiled; since he had no sense of humor at all, no one ever knew just what his smile might mean.  // Gore Vidal, "Lincoln"

`

“You could

take the entirety of the

common sense of humans

and put it in the palm of

your hand and still have

room for your dick.”

Anne Carson

`

She had thought of literature all these years as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses. // Virginia Woolf

`

"A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door." // Fran Lebowitz

`

Young men volunteered to dig a pit about twenty feet across and line it with furs and grave presents. Then they built a scaffold to hold the bones until the Master of the Feast dumped each bundle into the pit. The sheer brilliance of the Feast of the Dead, this reburial, lay in the idea that the bones—the souls—of individual people were very deliberately mixed together in a symbolic kettle. Here was the community, in death, becoming one great spiritual entity forever. It was important to invite every ally to be a part of this great spiritual unification. Friends and relatives from other villages and foreign nations cemented their friendship and kinship with the feasters by bringing some of their dead, too: the same kind of external bonds created by marriage were made in a funeral rite.

// from Bush Runner, by Mark Bourrie

`

"In these times there is a powerful demarcation between the surface and the deep currents of human development. Events and upheavals, which seem more profound than they really are, are happening on the surface. But there is another and deeper change in progress. It is of long, steady persistent growth, very little affected and not at all disturbed by surface conditions. The artist of today should be alive to this deeper evolution on which all growth depends, has depended and will depend. On the surface there is the battle of institutions, the illustration of events, the strife between peoples. On the surface there is propaganda and there is the effort to force opinions. The deeper current carries no propaganda. The shock of the surface upheaval does not deflect it from its course. It is in search of fundamental principle; that basic principle of all, which in degree as it is apprehended points the way to beauty and order, and to the law of nature."

`

“I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle."

// Audre Lorde

`

"I also managed to save up to buy a copy of Ulysses, which I placed on the bookshelf in the living room. My father told me to take it off the shelf. He said he wouldn’t have a book like that in the room where my mother served dinner."

-- Harold Pinter

`

"But any acquisition that doesn’t correspond to the labour expended is dishonest."

`

The Father [mellifluously]. Oh sir, you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.

`

“We don’t recognize their authority on our sovereign lands,” Mr. Polite said.

`

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries"

`

"The last 200 million years of Earth history in Newfoundland and Labrador have been dominated by erosion. "

`

"Si tout pouvait n’être qu'ombre. Ni être ni avoir été ni pouvoir être. Du calme. La suite. Attention."
(Samuel Beckett, mal vu mal dit )

`

‘Since the mere possibility that a man having intercourse with her could experience anything but undiluted sweetness terrified the actress as if she had seen a portent of the end of her career, they had finally separated.’

`

Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really posses? // Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

`

"In my trade you have to make more allowances, taking all sorts of ambiguities into account—to avoid hard-edged judgements. All this refraining may resemble naïveté. But it isn’t quite that. In art you become familiar with due process. You can’t simply write people off or send them to hell."

`

“It is a curious thing, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it.”

`

According to Alexandrov’s memoirs, a personal meeting was arranged between him and Stalin, at which the Soviet leader stated that the people love lively, cheerful art, but film directors were not willing to explore such genres. “Unfortunately, for some reason, our art is embarrassed to be happy and funny. It lags behind life. This is no good,” Stalin said.

`

adult household members who are romantic partners must share a bedroom // Artscape Toronto

`

"he also found a certain energy with a tendency toward abstraction, a disposition to seek a shape for life from within himself and not in what he could wrest from others." // Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

\

`

“Tutto questo” pensava “non dovrebbe poter durare; però durerà, sempre; il sempre umano, beninteso, un secolo, due secoli...; e dopo sarà diverso, ma peggiore. // ibid

`

"Pollack, you must be intransigent." // Visconti

`

An agreed picture of the Universe? What is that? And when we have come to know what it means, if we can, must we believe that novels have become poor because they lack it? […] Does the scientific imagination also have need of an agreed picture of the Universe?

`

“All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’”

— Toni Morrison

`

You know the Nishnaabeg-that-stayed as the homeless. The ones we are all related to. The forgotten ones. The ones that we think need help, but we don’t help. The only ones not on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

– Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming

`

The façade tends with most people, I suppose, as the years go by, to grow inward so that what began as a protection and screen of the naked soul becomes itself the soul. // Leonard Woolf

`

Le poème est partout comme les ailes du vent dans le vent qui ont touché un peu les ailes de la mouette. // Yorgos Seferis

`

The greatest difficulty is to accept the fact that the man is dead. It is one thing to know that a friend is dead and another thing to accept, within oneself, that unanswering silence: that not many of us are able to accept the reality of death is both an obvious and a labyrynthine statement. The imagination, then, which has been assigned the job of recreating and interpreting a life one witnessed and loved simply kicks like a stalled motor, refuses to make contact, and will not get the vehicle to move. One no longer knows if one ever really knew the person, but, what’s worse, that no longer makes any difference: one’s stuck with whatever it is one thought one knew, with whatever filtered through the complex screen of one’s limitations. That’s one’s legacy, that’s all there is: and now only that work which is love and that love which is work will allow one to come anywhere near obeying the dictum laid down by the great Ray Charles, and—tell the truth. // James Baldwin

`

"But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not--safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope--the entire possibility of freedom disappears.” // J.B. again

`

Well, then, why was it that when Negroes did start revolting across America, virtually all of white America was caught up in surprise and even shock? I would hate to be general of an army as badly informed as the American white man has been about the Negro in this country. // Malcolm X

`

"Again when reading about the period when he had discovered the prison library, Malcolm X’s head jerked up. “Boy! I never will forget that old aardvark!” The next evening, he came into the room and told me that he had been to the Museum of Natural History and learned something about the aardvark. “Now, aardvark actually means ‘earth hog.’ That’s a good example of root words, as I was telling you. When you study the science of philology, you learn the laws governing how a consonant can lose its shape, but it keeps its identity from language to language.” What astonished me here was that I knew that on that day, Malcolm X’s schedule had been crushing, involving both a television and radio appearance and a live speech, yet he had gone to find out something about the aardvark." // Alex Haley

`

"whenever i talk shit about another musician (sue me) i also check my self and ask-do i want to be them, fuck them, or write songs like them? usually it’s one of the 3..." // Hand Habits

`

“Well, I think to Mortimer the theatre has always seemed pretty small potatoes. He needs something big to criticize — something like the human race.” // Arsenic and Old Lace, Joseph Kesselring

`

All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys. // James Joyce, Ulysses

`

Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter. // JJ, Ulysses

`

People think of Americans as easygoing, but in fact they are all dead serious, especially about their local culture; they name their bars “saloons” and their shops “Ye Olde”; they wear the colors of the local high school team; they are Famous for Their Pies. Even in New York City. // Andrew Sean Greer, Less

`

Why do today’s young men insist on marrying? Was this why we all threw stones at the police, for weddings? // Andrew Sean Greer

`

"As a child I had suspected that Baldwin and I were similar, but for a long time, I was unprepared to accept that. I have never been comfortable being identified as a black anything, spokesperson in particular, particularly when that description comes from a white audience that knows nothing about its limitations. Nor have I ever been comfortable with the presumed fraternities some black writers, academics, and intellectuals feel with one another. I have spent my entire life trying to come to grips with my feelings for my own family, and I have not had room to be adopted by a family to whose provincialism, competitiveness, and numerous apprehensions I am not genetically bound." // Hilton Als

`

[The mathematician G.H.] Hardy had a maxim that it was never worth a first-class man’s time to express a majority opinion: by definition, there were plenty of others to do that. // Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes, Richard Davenport-Hines

`

DeCarava took photographs of white people tenderly but seldom. // Teju Cole

`

I dislike talking about myself in a direct way. The self is only interesting as an illustration. For some reason, whenever we talk about our personal lives they turn out to be both irrelevant and untrue - even when the facts are right, the mood is wrong.

English publishers and newspapers are mad for personal data, especially about people from Ireland. They love Irishmen. America is now even worse. And the unfortunate peoples of my island home lap up all that vulgarity when it is dished out to them. // Patrick Kavanagh

`

"Thinking about criticism as a job of educating yourself in public, while sustaining clarity and mystery at the same time, means giving up the idea of being right or wrong." // Hilton Als

`

It's never given to you. // Leonard Cohen

`

"Nineteenth-century civilization alone was economic in a different and distinctive sense, for it chose to base itself on a motive only rarely acknowledged as valid in the history of human societies, and certainly never before raised to the level of a justification of action and behavior in everyday life, namely, gain." // Karl Polanyi

`

I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance—As Tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a nothing— // John Keats

`

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. // ibid.

`

How could she take you and make you so lonely? You said she was only a friend. // Corin Raymond & Jonathan Byrd

`

I moved around the earth like the sun until after a while I no longer knew the way back.

— Abdulrazak Gurnah

`

“My stove has two front burners.” - Margaret Atwood, after a Canadian cabinet minister said covid had shifted climate change to the back burner.

`

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” // Audre Lorde

`

“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.” // Audre Lorde

`

Mainstream cinema has so deeply invested in racist mythography as part of its narrative structures that it will take nothing short of a revolution (i.e., audiences simply refusing to pay money to see films that actively perpetuate systems of domination) to change this world. Right now audiences act in profound complicity with the status quo.

// bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies

`

Mattina

M’illumino di immenso.

//Giuseppe Ungaretti

`

"if William Blake saw in every face he passed in London 'marks of weakness, marks of woe', O'Hara saw possible dates."

`

He didn't believe in assimilation. He never liked the word "gay," preferring "cocksucker, queer, or pansy." LeSueur said O'Hara also felt it was important to affirm his homosexuality, to make sure no one tried to gloss over it. When straight people said, "I don't see difference," LeSueur would yell at them.

"Every so often, I would have to remind my straights that I'm queer and don't pull any shit on me and don't forget it. Like, Mike goes, 'Oh, Joe, we don't mind!' I say, "What do you mean you don't mind? I'm just going to remind you!"

// Ada Calhoun quoting Joe LeSueur in Also A Poet

`

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”

//Toni Morrison

`

The time for saying, “we didn't know” is over.

// Mary Simon

`

Don’t cry, Miss Canada,

it’s not as though the country’s

in their hands.

— Leonard Cohen

`

The most difficult thing to do while living in a palace is to imagine a different life – for instance, your own life, but outside and minus the palace.

// Ryszard Kapuściński

`

In 1986 he published “The Ditch: A Spiritual Trial,” a work of prose and poems that centered on a German massacre of Russians in the Crimea in 1941 and the plundering in the 1980s of their mass graves by Soviet citizens. Mr. Voznesensky, tackling a subject long suppressed by the authorities, made clear that most of the 12,000 victims were Jews and implied that the looting of their bodies was tolerated for that reason.

At a poetry reading two years later, he took written questions from the audience. “All of you are Jews or sold out to Jews,” one note said. Another said, simply, “We will kill you.” Mr. Voznesensky read the unsigned notes aloud and demanded that the authors identify themselves. His challenge was met with silence.

// The New York Times, "Andrei Voznesensky, Russian Poet, Dies at 77"

`

“Poetry is the only hope,” [Voznesensky] added. “Even if you do not believe it, you have to do it.”

`

"Dreams do not foretell the future they reveal states of mind in which the future may be implicit."

// Robertson Davies

`

Among the bottles, a portrait of Borges watched us distractedly.

// Juan Gabriel Vásquez

`

For me, regardless of the ideology of the guilty regime, one had to oppose this treatment of human beings across the board, in all cases.

// Carolyn Forché

`

“When the undeniably eloquent Farrakhan denounces my people, is it possible that, unbeknownst to him, he is in fact just another self-hating Jew, like Philip Roth?”

// Barney Panofsky (via Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version)

`

My own music 
is not merely naked 
It is open-legged 
It is like a cunt 
and like a cunt 
must needs be houseproud 
I didn’t kill myself 
when things went wrong

// Leonard Cohen

`

"It’s a sin for a man to die rich"

// Milton Hershey

`

she seems lost on the sunniest days

// Michael Dennis

`

“I happen to believe in the beauty of simple things. I believe that the most uninteresting thing can be very interesting.”

// Saul Leiter

`

"J'ai une langue pour rire, le français, et une langue pour pleurer, le grec."

// Vassilis Alexakis

`

The coherence of the symbolic order of democratic politics relies on invoking exactly what it suppresses.

// Prof. John A. Grant, Jr

`

When I was young, everybody wanted to pick up a guitar. Now everybody wants to work at Goldman Sachs.

// David Geffen

`

Homer is new this morning and nothing perhaps is as old as today's newspaper.

// Charles Péguy

`

Jewish fellow-feeling – I hate it. I’m always on the brink of shouting out a coarse word, just to show that even though I’m in the midst of ten people who believe me their ‘brother in suffering’, I am in fact absolutely, definitively alone.

// Mihail Sebastian

`

“Authenticity was measured now in decibels. Every utterance, every expressive gesture, was read as a pledge of allegiance to some discernable creed.”

// Ayad Akhtar

`

“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we have built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us
with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed.”

// Rebecca West

`

Underdevelopment only allows for great works of literature. Lesser works, in this monotonous or apocalyptic landscape, are an unattainable luxury.

// Roberto Bolaño

`

These days people don’t believe in God. They believe in the fire brigade.

// Max Frisch, from The Arsonists

`

Bugger the prairies
and their crazy trees,

Bugger the patriots
and their knock-knees

— John Newlove

`

Language became a salve to longing.

// Nick Cave

`

Here, our creative impulses lie in ambush at the side of our lives, ready to leap forth and kick holes in it - holes through which inspiration can rise. We each have our need to create, and sorrow itself is a creative act.

// Nick Cave

`

[on top 40 pop] These songs deny us our human-ness and our God-given right to be sad, and the airwaves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the whispers of sorrow and the echoes of grief.

// Nick Cave

`

These stolen souls we set adrift, like lost astronauts floating for eternity through the stratospheres of the divine. Me, I never trust a woman who writes letters, because I know that I, myself, cannot be trusted. Words endure, flesh does not. The poet will always have the upper hand. Me, I'm a soul-catcher for God. Here I come with my butterfly net of words. Here I catch the chrysalis. Here I blow life into bodies, and hurl them fluttering to the stars and the care of God.

// Nick Cave

`

"comparar países es tan absurdo como inevitable, aunque las conclusiones sean siempre elementales, injustas o provisorias."

// Alejandro Zambra

`

"When you have large amounts of power, denying that power isn't humble, it's abusive." // Anand Giridharadas

`

“If you’re a poet you can give someone everything in two minutes. And they can walk away with that ringing in their head.”

// Reginald Dwayne Betts

`

"if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lillies I should call it langour--but as I am* I must call it Laziness—"

*especially as I have a black eye

// John Keats

`

N’imitez rien ni personne .Un lion qui copie un lion devient un singe.

// Victor Hugo, Tas de Pierres

`

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

// Albert Einstein

`

Le seul façon de te sauver toi-même c'est de lutter pour sauver les autres...

// Nikos Kazantzakis

`

rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a
poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster.

// William Shakespeare

`

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.

// Dave Barry

`

Be who you are! Think for yourself! Be a cog in no System! Admonishments, exhortations and calls to authenticity such as these, whose value once seemed beyond argument, have become so prevalent in Western culture, and now emanate from such dubious sources, so that they not only ring false, but have about them the X-ray glow of their own inverted meaning. We're told to think critically by looming, spotlit billboards erected by companies whose product is at best unnecessary, and at worst a direct link to human suffering. The language of resistance is owned and trademarked.

// Ken Babstock, 2002

`

No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make "safe" and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilisation could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all.

// E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, 1973

`

Neither side is right. We know that right off the top. To press people into military service isn't right. The Israelis have lost the cream of each generation. So have the Egyptians. This is the real human crunch. This is the real human predicament. This universe is only to be tolerated, it's not to be solved. All these things are unclear but amidst this incredible lack of clarity we have to act. That's what the whole tragic vision is about.

// Leonard Cohen

`

When you jump into a pool of really cold water, when you hit that water there's no you.

// Leonard Cohen

`

“The earth is a graveyard and the one and only project of humanity is to reclaim it for life. That people dear to us should disappear into eternity is intolerable, and we can't accept it without cowardice.”

// Saul Bellow

`

'What’s left to say but that when a man in a metallic turquoise outfit and a feathered hat sings “no dress rehearsal, this is our life,” one best pay attention to him.'

// Brad Wheeler

`

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay a hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

// Martin Luther King, Jr.

`

Do you have a friend in New York?
Is she fighting for your art?

// Nadia Reid

`

Nueva York no fue, pues, saturada de estas bellas y excelentes obras de arte, y así se evitó que en los botes de basura americanos aparecieran, sucias y despreciadas, las policromadas canastitas tejidas con poemas no cantados, con pedacitos de alma y gotas de sangre del corazón de un indio mexicano.

// B. Traven

`

Si tú estás en Nueva York   
en Nueva York no hay nadie más
y si no estás en Nueva York  
en Nueva York no hay nadie.

// Ernesto Cardenal

`

Why so silent? Ask your heart:
didn’t you too feel happier
the farther we got from Greece?

// C.P. Cavafy

`

Αν άφεση δεν είναι η ποίηση, –ψιθύρισε μόνος του– τότε, από πουθενά μην περιμένουμε έλεος.

// Γιάννης Ρίτσος

~

“If poetry's not an absolution”, he mutters for his own benefit, “then let's not expect mercy from anywhere.”

// Yannis Ritsos

`

“I’m just a kid, Lare,” he whispered. “I want to be beautiful just a little bit longer.”

// Richard Van Camp, The Lesser Blessed

`

“The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink – and in drinking understand themselves.”

// Federico García Lorca

`

“Sir, I have read your letter, and I see that to the brazen everything is brass. Your obedient servant Oscar Wilde.”

`

People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.

// Suzan-Lori Parks, from Topdog Underdog

`

Who die in defence of--what?
Homes that they haven't got

// Robert Service

`

I often think, while watching such takedowns of white men and their corporate culture, Yes, black lives matter, of course they do, and, yes, women have a powerful voice in all our lives, but, after that, what? What happens to our complex humanity once we’ve identified the bad guys? Who wants to make some noise that doesn’t ultimately glorify the power it intends to critique? Who can sing, freely and loudly, about being human?

// Hilton Als

`

"Anonymity has been pretty good to me," he says, knitting his fingers together. "I think of old age as the same twilight – a value in being relieved of light pollution. You start to see the fundamentals in the sky. And that's where I am now. I can see the constellations."

// Van Dyke Parks

`

“If you wanted a poem you only had to look out a window. There was material always walking, running, screaming, or signing.”

// Gwendolyn Brooks

`

and no i don't prefer obscurity
but i'm an idealistic girl
and i wouldn't work for you
no matter what you paid
i may not be able
to change the whole fucking world
but i can be the million
that you never made

// Ani Difranco

`

I didn’t like poetry. When I read the Shakespearean sonnets, I feel like some of them are mercenary. How many poems can you write where you say, “You’re so beautiful that you should reproduce yourself and I’m the guy to do it”? [Laughs.] They can’t all be inspired. It’s like somebody came to him and said, “Give me a poem like you did for Joe and I’ll give you 50 bucks.”

// Joni Mitchell

`

Interviewer: Why do you write?

Toni Morrison: I’m very good at it.

`

“For me, poetry is always in motion—it lives and breathes in the subconscious at all times, a perpetual Dia de los Muertos parade. It resists the law of inertia. Poetry is best when it is processionary, when you cannot help but keep it close and take it with you wherever you go.”

// Iliana Rocha

`

I think we all feel that, as writers -- that we won't do justice to the pearls in their hearts.

// Lawrence Hill

`

I'd be a hero but I can't stand the stench.

// Elvis Costello

`

Some people want to know how a watch works, and other people just want to know what time it is.

// Robbie Robertson

`

The Allies have won—or at any rate, America has won. Has democracy been recognized? Have small nations had their rights? The piteous plight of Ireland gives the lie direct to those profound prevaricators called the Coalition Government. The Allies saw to it that a faked plebiscite was carried through in Alsace-Lorraine and Slesvig to take away parts of the German Empire, and that all the small nations round the Russian territory obtained their independence as a first step to bribery and use against Russia herself.

But to let Ireland have independence is a different story.

— John McLean

`

I’m reminded of a moment when Paul Desmond was being interviewed, which sums up a question from the outside and an answer from the inside. The interviewer said, How do you account for all the melancholy in your playing, Mr. Desmond? And he said, Well, probably because I’m not playing any better.

— Billy Collins

`

I think we have to stop seeing women solely as victims and also see women as people who make political choices. Some people like to say that Anita Hill and Desiree Washington were radicalized by the process of what happened to them. I'm interested in a world where women become radicalized before we are victimized.

— bell hooks in conversation with Kevin Powell, from The Kevin Powell Reader

`

“Purism is the best cover-up for mediocrity.”

— Harry Belafonte, 1959

`

"The most difficult thing to do while living in a palace is to imagine a different life – for instance, your own life, but outside of and minus the palace."

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

`

That Mr. Bernard is rich beyond anybody's dreams, that he is powerful, is not to be denied. The bootlegging was clever—not such a sin—and many who condemn him do it out of envy. Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan or Rockefeller were worse bandits. What I'm trying to say, forgive me, is that such princes in America are entitled to their mansions, a Rolls-Royce, chinchilla coats, yachts, young cuties out of burlesque shows. But a poet they should never be able to afford. It has to do with what? Human dignity. The dead. The sanctity of the word. I'm explaining it badly. But the man I took you for, L.B., you are not."

—Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here

`

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

// Frank O'Hara

`

One characteristic of workingclass writing is that we often pile up
many events within a small amount of space rather than detailing the
many implications of one or two events. This means both that our lives
are chock full of action and also that we are bursting with stories which
haven’t been printed, made into novels, dictionaries, philosophies.

// Judy Grahn

`

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for character.

// W.H. Auden

`

It was the excellent Socrates ruined Athens.

// Jack Gilbert

`

Voltaire’s important place in the history of European moral attitudes has much to do with his consistent and principled hostility to cruelty, which is exemplified in the passages Professor Ball mentions. So it’s good of him to remind us that you can be opposed to cruelty, while yet being racist and anti-Semitic. Jeremy Bentham’s case for protecting animals from abuse was predicated on their ability to suffer as we do, not to reason as we can. In the landscape of moral progress, empathy and respect turn out to be different edifices.

// Kwame Anthony Appiah

`

“This is true in every part of life: There are rules that are there to keep people in power, and if you’re outside of those rules—first they tell you that those rules are the reason you can’t get in, and then if you break the rules, they tell you that breaking the rules is the reason you can’t get in. But you can’t get in either way, so you might as well break the rules.”

// Sarah Schulman

`

We like perfection, and we'll take it.

// Bob Holman

`

Amnesia leads to despair in many ways.

// Rebecca Solnit

`

Too late to fall
Upon my sword
I have no sword
It's 2005

// Leonard Cohen

`

There's no scene anywhere so why say, "Whatever happened to the New York scene," why not just say everything is dead?

// Lydia Lunch, 1983

`

The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.

// Ta-Nahesi Coates

`

The abundance of beards in periods of social unrest, times of revolt or upheaval, should be noted. It’s the handiest way people have of making themselves mysterious.

— Mihail Sebastian

`

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become.

// James Baldwin, No Name In the Street

`

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
― Mary Oliver, West Wind

`

On especially enjoyable days I suffer an early afternoon drop-fine weather makes it all the worse. The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings—the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything—makes me despair. I'll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.

// Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

`

this you must know is the amen to nonsense

// John Keats

`

In your arms, she's your wife, but perched atop a tree, she's some kind of strange bird.

// Mo Yan

`

If there are readers who haven’t read my books, I couldn’t recommend anything to read to them; instead, I’d advise them to go out, sit down somewhere, perhaps by the side of a brook, with nothing to do, nothing to think about, just remaining in silence like stones. They will eventually meet someone who has already read my books.

// László Krasznahorkai

`

Οπου και να ταξιδέψω ή 'Ελλάδα με πληγώνει.

// Γιώργος Σεφέρης (George Seferis)

`

Most of the interesting women you know are far, far angrier than you'd imagine.

// Laurie Penny

`

In 1990, when he was a physically wasted, half-blind yet zestful 79-year-old, I interviewed Naguib Mahfouz in the Ali Baba cafe overlooking Cairo's central Tahrir Square, where he breakfasted for 40 years and which he had seen change from a Nile-side preserve of the rich to a demotic chaos. "The square has had many scenes," he said. "It used to be more quiet. Now it is disturbing but more progressive, better for ordinary people - and therefore better for me also, as one who likes his fellow humans." Any country is fortunate if it produces citizens like him.

// John Ezard

`

When I talk to my mom on the phone, I tape the conversations if I can, because it is really fascinating to look at how she structures events and sequences, the internal logic. She'll start of talking about somebody's birthday, and then she'll go to talking about the sale, you know, the sale that was on at the grocery store, and then she'll be talking about my aunt who just died. And if I just put it down literally, it would be as avant-garde as anything James Joyce ever did.

// bell hooks

`

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

// James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

`

“I trust America. America is too great a power to betray a small people like the Kurds.” —Mustafa Barzani, 1973

“One should not confuse undercover action with social work.”
—Henry Kissinger, 1975

`

"If all of Alberta's pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator."

// John Vaillant

`

"The provincial person is always looking over his shoulder to see if anybody thinks he’s provincial. This worry is really the identifying mark of provincialism. Whereas, the parochial person is always assured of the imaginative sufficiency of the parish. The local place."

// Wendell Berry via Seamus Heaney

`

Ireland is a village in Trieste with James Joyce; Devon with Sean O’Casey; Paris with Sam Beckett and all tied together… to an elderly degenerate proselytising umbilical lasso known as the Archbishop of Dublin. Ireland is a figment of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, her vices extolled as virtues and her glorious memory perpetuated by Boss Croker and Tammany Hall. Ireland is a lie, a state or place non-existent…’

// Brendan Behan

`

Where I am is the cosmic individual. Nothing grand, nothing romantic. A duck blown out to sea and still squawking.

// Hayden Carruth

`

Confusion is the sweat of learning.

// Rhett Allain

`

An end that would come for them, an end that would come for all of us, every living creature on this planet. Life, after all, was just a flicker, a quick, noisy interval between the cry at birth and the last gasp of death, and all that they, that we, had lived in the interval would be forgotten, would recede forever into the shadows.

But we are not alone on this journey. In that brief moment of light we can hurt one another or we can alleviate the suffering, in that interval or interlude or flicker, there is the chance to fight the darkness. Even if we know how it will vanish, ourselves, this world, eventually the Universe itself. To relieve the pain of others, could that not be what justifies a birth we did not choose, gives meaning to the life that we stumble along as best we can, is that love not a consolation for the death that will come despite our best efforts to ignore its existence?

// Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum

`

Since I couldn’t photograph the questioner, I’ll photograph the questions, I said to myself. And so I did.

// Ferit Edgü, The Wounded Age

`

It is not true that history repeats itself any more than that humans are mere spectators watching an endlessly looping reel. The fallacy of helplessness implicates us in this tragic repetition.

—Aron Aji

`