quotation compendium
0 Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part. —Hermann Broch
1 When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’ Some writers can ignore this presence, but I have never learned how. —Flannery O’Connor
2 Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself. —David Foster Wallace
3 Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. —Matt Groening
4 I wish I had spoken only of it all. —Gertrude Stein
5 A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it? —Gertrude Stein
6 You have to be careful, ask yourself questions, as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes how long it will still go on, anything at all to keep from losing the thread of the dream. —Samuel Beckett
7 Just feeling is a subversive act. Expressing it is rebellious. —Jeff Buckley
8 Desire is the transforming fire that softens all the old straitjackets we have brought into this life, until they dissolve like the worn out patchwork they were in the first place; it is the fundamental movement of energy throughout the cosmos; it is our human form of gravity. —Penny Gill
9 I began to write because I was too shy to talk, and too lonely not to send messages. —Heather McHugh
10 Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive. —Kurt Vonnegut
11 The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff. —Marvin Bell
12 I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint. —Frida Kahlo
13 I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best. —Frida Kahlo
14 I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing. I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out. —Nathaniel Hawthorne
15 I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better it appears to me. —Abraham Lincoln
16 The world would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang the best. —Henry David Thoreau
17 What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it. Once we are drawn into the withdrawal, we are drawing toward what attracts us by its withdrawal. […] And what withdraws in such a manner keeps and develops its own, incomparable nearness. —Martin Heidegger
18 Having. A having without limits, without restriction, a having without any “deposit,” a having-love that sustains itself with loving; in the blood-rapport. —Hélène Cixous
19 And my heart stood still with pride that he had ever married me. —Virginia Woolf
20 All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself. —WH Auden
21 If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?—Marquise de Sévigné
22 The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. —George Eliot
23 When the poets repair to the forest of language it is with the express purpose of getting lost; far gone in bewilderment, they seek crossroads of meaning, unexpected echoes, strange encounters; they fear neither detours, surprises, nor darkness. —Paul Valéry
24 Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. —Agnes de Mille
25 There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because 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 will be lost. —Martha Graham
26 All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh. —Doris Lessing
27 When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image. —Meister Eckhart
28 One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. —André Gide
29 You are lost the instant you know what the result will be. —Juan Gris
30 Stop looking for ways out. Be willing to be lost. —CD Wright
31 Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. —Jalal Al-din Rumi
32 Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about…. Say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe. —Jalal Al-din Rumi
33 My broken arms heal themselves around you. —Galway Kinnell
34 That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes. —Kabir
35 When the Guest is being searched for it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work. Look at me…you will see a slave of that intensity. —Kabir
36 Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. […] The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language. —Adrienne Rich
37 Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass, / That am a timid woman, on her way / From one house to another!—Edna St. Vincent Millay
38 Smile, smile, and get some work to do / Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go. —Stevie Smith
39 I think, “The thoughts are like terrible ballet teachers with canes.” —Chelsea Minnis
40 Just for a small and a forgotten time / I have had full in my eyes from off my girl / The whitest pouring of eternal light——translated from the Sanskrit by E. Powys Mathers
41 In your perusall you shall finde them Seren, cleere and eligantly plaine, such gentle straines as shall recreate and not perplexe your braine, no intricacie or cloudy stuffe to puzzell intellect, but perfect eloquence. —John Benson, preface to “Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare,” 1640
42 The man who writes no books, thinks a lot, and lives in inadequate society will usually be a good letter-writer. —Friedrich Nietzsche
43 Why do we feel pangs of conscience after ordinary parties? Because we have taken important matters lightly; because we have discussed people with less than complete loyalty, or because we were silent when we should have spoken; because we did not on occasion jump up and run away; in short, because we behaved at the party as if we belonged to it. —Friedrich Nietzsche
44 To correct nature. — If someone does not have a good father, he should acquire one. —Friedrich Nietzsche
45 No standstill in love. — A musician who loves the slow tempo will take the same pieces slower and slower. Thus there is no standstill in any love. —Friedrich Nietzsche
46 The slow arrow of beauty. — The noblest kind of beauty…does not transport us suddenly, [but] slowly filters into our minds, which we take away with us almost unnoticed, and which we encounter again in our dreams…. What is it that we long for at the sight of beauty? We long to be beautiful, we fancy it must bring much happiness with it. But that is a mistake. —Friedrich Nietzsche
47 And the thing that excited me so very much at that time and still does is that the words or words that make what I looked at be itself were always words that to me very exactly related themselves to that thing the thing at which I was looking, but as often as not had nothing I say nothing whatever to do with what any words would do that described that thing. —Gertrude Stein
48 No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written. He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. —TS Eliot
49 Inside everyone lives a fearful Platonic Censor, who shudders at the thought of enlargement, and forbids it. To make poems is to violate Platonic standards of civilization; the poet grows up in civilization, subject to its prohibitions; the Plato inside him banishes—and punishes—Orpheus and Dionysus. In old stories about the Devil, he gives us what we ask for, and it is our ruin. —Donald Hall
50 The unrealizable ideal is to write as if the earth opened up and spoke. I think that if the earth did speak, she would espouse no one set of values, affections, meanings, that everything embraced would also somehow be annihilated and denied. —Frank Bidart
51 I conjure you all that have had the evil luck to read this ink-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the nine Muses, no more to scorn the sacred mysteries of poesy [but] to believe, with me, that there are many mysteries contained in poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused. —Sir Philip Sidney
52 Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came. —Gerard Manley Hopkins
53 Desiring greatness, / Able to recognize greatness wherever it is, / And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant, / I knew what was left for smaller men like me: / A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud, / A tournament of hunchbacks, literature. —Czeslaw Milosz
54 When man is at his very best, he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel. —Howells
55 And knowing—this—that soon / My little book of incantation // Will be done. It was a magical. / And it is nothing that I want. —Lucie Brock-Broido
56 Vive en mi ausencia como en una casa. —Pablo Neruda
57 A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. —Gertrude Stein
58 …y hambriento vengo y voy olfateando el crepúsculo / buscándote, buscando tu corazón caliente / como un puma en la soledad de Quitratúe. —Pablo Neruda
59 …te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras, secretamente, entre la sobra y el alma. —Pablo Neruda
60 There was no one else in the park, / Only bare trees with an infinity of tragic shapes / To make thinking difficult. —Charles Simic
61 Why does it never occur to romantic poets that they exist as much by right in the universe as any other creature, and that their function as poets is a natural function? In art this can lead to silence; in life, to suicide. —Joyce Carol Oates
62 From what grace am I fallen. Tongues are strange, / Signs say nothing. The falcon who spoke clear / To Canacee cries gibberish to coarsened ears. —Wallace Stevens
63 There is no place here for the inexact / praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. / There is only time for this merciless inventory. —Eavan Boland
64 Music without words is like leaving the mind behind. And leaving the mind behind is meditation. Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is music. —Kabir
65 If I were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer, A beautiful House; and if I were further asked to name the production next in importance and the thing next to be longed for, I should answer, A beautiful Book. To enjoy good houses and good books in self-respect and decent comfort, seems to me to be the pleasurable end towards which all societies of human beings ought now to struggle. —William Morris
66 Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t. —Theodore Roethke
67 I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say “Love” and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog. —Djuna Barnes
68 The doctor lifted the bottle. “Thank you,” said Felix. “I never drink spirits.”
“You will,” said the doctor. —Djuna Barnes
69 Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?—Djuna Barnes
70 Just go into the room and put one chair in the center. Take the one seat in the center of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come. —Achaan Chah
71 I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. —Annie Dillard
72 The study of the beautiful is a duel in which the artist cries out with terror before he is vanquished. —Charles Baudelaire
73 The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape. —Leonard Cohen
74 Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power. —Jean Baudrillard
75 He felt bad. —Kingsley Amis
76 Generally the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke. There was no touching the hem of mystery, no little occasion when any of us thought—well, speaking for myself only, I suppose—that our lungs were filled with light, or anything like that. I had a moment’s glory that night, though. I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn’t tolerate any other place. —Denis Johnson
77 Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it is the only way you can do anything really good. You have to write badly in order to write well. —William Faulkner
78 The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays. —Emmanuel Levinas
79 Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. —Simone Weil
80 Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. —Simone Weil
81 The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. —Simone Weil
82 To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love. —Simone Weil
83 That divine love which one touches in the depth of affliction, like Christ’s resurrection through crucifixion, that love which is the central core and intangible essence of joy, is not a consolation. It leaves pain completely intact. —Simone Weil
84 Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others. —Virginia Woolf
85 It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. —Virginia Woolf
86 If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?—Alice Walker
87 It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. —Joan Baez
88 Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television. —Rita Mae Brown
89 The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you. —Rita Mae Brown
90 I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. —Willa Cather
91 Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky. —Willa Cather
92 All the intelligence and talent in the world can’t make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity. —Willa Cather
93 There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. —Willa Cather
94 The days you work are the best days. —Georgia O’Keeffe
95 I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me—shapes and ideas so near to me—so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught. —Georgia O’Keeffe
96 Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for a longer time at what pains you. —Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
97 Chekhov, Chekhov—oh, why are you dead, why can’t I talk to you?!—Katherine Mansfield
98 There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —Anaïs Nin
99 I have the right to love many people at once and to change my prince often. —Anaïs Nin
100 I’m never going to be famous. I don’t do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more. —Dorothy Parker
101 A pagan education would sharpen the mind, steel the will, and seduce the senses. Our philosophy should be both contemplative and pugilistic, admitting aggression (as Christianity does not) as central to our mythology. The beasts of passion must be confronted, and the laws of nature understood. Conflict cannot be avoided, but perhaps it can be confined to a mental theater. —Camille Paglia
102 The moment of change is the only poem. —Adrienne Rich
103 Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. —Adrienne Rich
104 It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making. —Susan Sontag
105 The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. —Susan Sontag
106 Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. —Susan Sontag
107 Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism-victimless collecting, as it were…in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. —Susan Sontag
108 Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. —Susan Sontag
109 Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction. —Susan Sontag
110 It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. —Gertrude Stein
111 A diary means yes indeed. —Gertrude Stein
112 I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it. —Gertrude Stein
113 I don’t breed well in captivity. —Gloria Steinem
114 Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else. —Gloria Steinem
115 So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again. —Sojourner Truth
116 You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation. —Billie Holiday
117 Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—to stand outside—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away. —bell hooks
118 Pray inwardly, even if you do not enjoy it. It does good, though you feel nothing. Yes, even though you think you are doing nothing. —Julian of Norwich
119 I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration. —Frida Kahlo
120 There are years that ask questions and years that answer. —Zora Neale Hurston
121 I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. —Elizabeth Cady Stanton
122 Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. —Annie Dillard
123 I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between. —Sylvia Plath
124 A further sign of health is that we don’t become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us. —Ane Pema Chödrön
125 We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. —Ane Pema Chödrön
126 Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. —Toni Morrison
127 Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul…Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. —Nathaniel Hawthorne
128 Should you reject yourself because you count buttons and pick up glass when all civilization tells you: please, this is hardly the time?—Richard Hugo
129 I thought of suicide for the first time when I was eight. The thought cheered me up wonderfully….For if one can remove oneself at any time from the world, why particularly now?—Stevie Smith
130 In my poems I have tried to shift feelings outwards by fixing them on imaginary people…because it gives proportion and eases the pressure, puts the feelings at one remove, cools the fever. —Stevie Smith
131 [When asked if she was a "typical example" of a contemporary poet:] I’m alive today, therefore I’m as much a part of our time as everybody else. The times will just have to enlarge themselves to make room for me, won’t they?—Stevie Smith
132 All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will always be another poet. —Stevie Smith
133 Above all I try to avoid getting too despairing. I try to remember what they said in the thirteen-hundreds: Accidie poisons the soul stream. —Stevie Smith
134 If I had been the Virgin Mary, I’d have said: No, no, I’ll have no part in it, no savior, no world to come, nothing. —Stevie Smith
135 Artists have set out, however unconsciously, to prove one of two things: either that they are mad in a sane world, or that they are sane in a mad world. —Dylan Thomas
136 I threw away the sweetness of Christianity and remembered the harsh bones that lay beneath, and I said: It is immoral. —Stevie Smith
137 [On why she had not written her New Yorker article:] Someone else was using the pencil. —Dorothy Parker
138 I’m probably a couple of sherries below par most of the time. —Stevie Smith
139 A good friend doesn’t mind that you keep chorus girls in a grain silo. —Richard Hugo
140 So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking fantastically….It was as if she had been made afresh, out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself, without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime. —Nathaniel Hawthorne
141 To keep the pain from translating itself into memory. She begins each time by charting every moment, the date, the time of day, the weather, a brief notation on the events that have occurred or that are to come. She begins each time with this ablution as if this act would release her from the very antiphony to follow. She begins the search the words of equivalence to that of her feeling. Or the absence of it. Synonym, simile, metaphor, byword, byname, ghostword, phantomnation. In documenting the map of her journey. —Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
142 Naked we are so clumsy, fearful, we seem like children that fashion fortresses and secret hiding places from leaves. Naked after the fortress and the silence. Then I tell you that you grow near in order to disentangle, that all is golden like the bodies born from the chimeras of autumn. Then I open up completely like the top of a tree whose shadow summons up the destiny of your hands like a hidden spring of dry leaves. —Marjorie Agosín
143 “Monsieur, the next moment may be the moment of your death, you know it and yet you can smile: come now, isn’t that admirable? In the most insignificant of your actions,” he adds sourly, “there is an immensity of heroism.” “And what will you gentlemen have for dessert?” asks the waitress. “Cheese,” I say heroically. —Jean-Paul Sartre
144 To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try to understand. To never look away. —Arundhati Roy
145 When you’re depressed, there’s no calendar. There are no dates, there’s no day, there’s no night, there’s no seconds, there’s no minutes, there’s nothing. You’re just existing in this cold, murky, ever-heavy atmosphere, like they put you inside a vial of mercury. —Rod Steiger
146 Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. —Herman Melville
147 A hypertrophy of intellectual and emotional inwardness will often turn into boredom, desolation and grotesque or banal forms of philistinism. —Georg Lukacs
148 You must, he thought, beware of turgid speeches masking commonplace passions; as though the soul’s abundance does not sometimes spill over in the most decrepit metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of their needs, their ideas, their afflictions, and since human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars. —Gustave Flaubert
149 Every word makes a necessary contribution to the poem, which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. —Ezra Pound
150 The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes. —James Agee
151 it must be the colors and
the kids who keep me
alive because the music is
boring me to death—Chan Marshall
152 Because the city is static while we are moving. The tear is proof of that. Because we go and beauty stays. Because we are headed for the future, while beauty is the eternal present. The tear is an attempt to remain, to stay behind, to merge with the city. But that’s against the rules. The tear is a throwback, a tribute of the future to the past. Or else it is the result of subtracting the greater from the lesser: beauty from man. The same goes for love, because one’s love, too, is greater than oneself. —Joseph Brodsky
153 Self-criticism…is what imparts to his voice in this poem its lyrical poise. If you think there are other recipes for successful poetic operation, you are in for oblivion. —Joseph Brodsky
154 I go out on stage, and my intention is to make the first four rows bleed from their ears. —Sonny Sharrock
155 Sound that stops the capacity for judgment. Sound that never decays. Sound that breaks free from every possibe image. Sound that comes from both death and birth. Sound that dies. The sound around me. Sound like the symptoms of eternal cold turkey. Sound that resists private ownership. Sound that goes insane. Sound that spills over from the cosmos. The sound of sound. —Kaoru Abe
156 I want to become faster than anyone. Faster than cold, than man alone, than the Earth, than Andromeda. Where, where is the crime?—Kaoru Abe
157 The truth is, if you’re still working on a piece at 3 in the morning, you’re not Keats, you’re just late. —Anthony Lane
158 A great enormous thing, like—like nothing. A huge big—well, like a—I don’t know—like an enormous big nothing. Like a jar. —AA Milne
159 Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. —Germaine Greer
160 If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. —John Cage
161 Arrange whatever pieces come your way. —Virginia Woolf
162 For love…has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them. —Virginia Woolf
163 But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. —Virginia Woolf
164 Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. —Virginia Woolf
165 At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. —Virginia Woolf
166 Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title. —Virginia Woolf
167 Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. —Virginia Woolf
168 Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. —Virginia Woolf
169 I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again—as I always am when I write. —Virginia Woolf
170 Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters. —Stevie Smith
171 It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own. —Stevie Smith
172 My whole life is in my poems, everything I have lived through, and done, and seen, and read and imagined and thought and argued. —Stevie Smith
173 [Cats] are not ours, to possess and know, they belong to another world and from that world and its strange obediences no human being can steal them away. It is a thought that cheers one up….It was the indifference, the beastly, truly beastly—that is appertaining to beasts—indifference of poor dear Tidzal that I so relished. —Stevie Smith
174 The passage she blasts is often covered in splinters, covered in blood, but she can come out softly…hasn’t the muse anything better than that, than to throw such nonsense about. —Stevie Smith
175 The human creature is alone in his carapace – Poetry is a strong way out. —Stevie Smith
176 Learn too that being comical does not ameliorate the desperation. —Stevie Smith
177 It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy. —Steve Jobs
178 Dead words. Dead tongue. From disuse. Buried in Time’s memory. Unemployed. Unspoken. History. Past. Let the one who is diseuse, one who is mother who waits nine days and nine nights be found. Restore memory. Let the one who is diseuse, one who is daughter restore spring with her each appearance from beneath the earth. The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all. —Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
179 How do we make any decisions? I mean, in the same way we/I make any decisions. Logic. Aesthetics. Discretion. Permission. Mood. Feelings. Luck. The same way you pick a pink t-shirt over a blue one. Vodka over gin. Free verse over a sestina. Hopkins/Dickinson/Berrigan over Blake/Whitman/Ashbery. Alaska over France. To dye your hair blonde. To have children. To take a lover. To get a divorce. I meant: To get a divorce. To take a lover. —Olena Kalytiak Davis
180 I think I am attracted to words the way some people are to shoes, or, to, say, other people. —Olena Kalytiak Davis
181 “I should be ill,” she continued, “if I did not live on the borders of the fairies’ country, and now and then eat of their food. And I see by your eyes that you are not quite free of the same need; though, from your education and the activity of your mind, you have felt it less than I.” —George Macdonald
182 The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom. —George Macdonald
183 For excuse, for our being together, we sit at the typewriter, pretending a necessary collaboration…the typewriter is guilty with love and flowery with shame. —Elizabeth Smart
184 Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. —Walter Pater
185 The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
186 I don’t want to be buried. My grandmother was convinced I should be burned as a witch and I think that’s probably right, that’s how I should go. I think fire is cleansing and beautiful. So I definitely want to be cremated and not put in a confined space. —Tori Amos
187 Especially in this town. Everybody needs love. House love. Dishes love. Moth-on-the-screendoor love, spot-on-the-wall love. That’s god’s hand. Known as the persistence of vision, the eye’s ability to perceive a series of still images as continuous motion. —CD Wright
188 I am sorry. I mean for no one to come to such harm. But vulnerability in a man. I find it very appealing. Forgive me. I do not mean to intrude. Whereas cowardice is commonplace. Among men. Vulnerability is a rarity. —CD Wright
189 I played the percussion of “Cruel” in the shower on my excess fat. It sounded really good—it made me feel good when I’d have that next bag of potato chips. I’d say ‘Look, “Cruel” sounds great in the shower. You eat those chips, girl!’—Tori Amos
190 You have to go to the venom for the antidote. —Tori Amos
191 Eminem’s “97 Bonnie & Clyde” stared me right in the face: bloody irresistable. How could I not pick up that gauntlet? She had no voice. Women are so sick of the bitch in the truck and yo bitch this and bitch that. She took me by the hand, the ghost of this woman showed me, as she lay dying in the songworld. —Tori Amos
192 I’m not the sort of person who gets played at parties or weddings. I mean, you know, you mention my name and you get an eye roll, until, of course, you’re jumping off a bridge. —Tori Amos
193 You as a songwriter, whoever you are, have to really align with the idea of ‘What is your purpose?’ Some songwriters’ purpose is to make people laugh, and they’re magical at it. That is their gift. That’s not everybody’s gift. It’s a special one. It’s very tricky to do that. Some songwriters paint almost like sonic canvasses for people to step into, to escape the television set. Some artists tap into that place in the heart and can walk with sorrow and walk with you in all the trenches, and that’s their gift. And all of these gifts, I feel, have their place now. Not only were the two towers split wide open, but we were, and our emotional self has been. So there is a need for any kind of emotion, whether it’s fear or anger or sadness or escape—all of it. —Tori Amos
194 You’re always going to see the world differently if you pee standing up. —Tori Amos
195 At first I tried to play poker with every god from every religion. To negotiate with them. I walked to the edges of this dimension to ask, what do I have to do for which of you in order to keep a baby? I waited to see if any of them would show up to talk to me. The Islamic god? The Christian god? Any god would have done: just give me the child! But no, they were all busy playing golf. —Tori Amos
196 I don’t mean to sound like a lunatic. But songs to me are alive. They don’t have physical bodies, but their essence is similar. —Tori Amos
197 The animus in me is raspberry swirl, I’m in love with my women friends, but I just don’t eat pussy. But I’m in love with them. If I had a different sensibility, then you know I think I could, you know, really fulfill someone down there, where a lot of men in their lives don’t. And eating pussy is a metaphor, too—it’s about crawling in there, being with their juices, really being with them. —Tori Amos
198 I can’t have discussions about it anymore, I just can’t. When someone asks me if I’ve found Jesus, I say, ‘Yeah, I saw him at a Nirvana concert a couple of years ago.’ It’s like, Jesus has got things to do, he’s got a ten o’clock. He’s not going to fix things for me, I have to fix things for myself, so I try and have a sense of humor about it and nobody finds my humor very amusing. We’ve just got to lighten up on the savior bit, folks. You know, get off the cross, we need the wood. —Tori Amos
199 Once I get a taste of the essence of a song, then I go and do research. I have hundreds of books in the house that I don’t necessarily read until I pick one up one day that I’ve never picked up before and I turn it to page 102, and there’s a picture of something that makes me go to another reference book, that makes me go somewhere else, than makes me take a drive, and then I start forming what the language is. It’s so much like word association, you’re getting an essence, and you’re getting a picture on many layers. And then you’re saying, ‘There are millions of words I can choose here so how do you find the right ones?’ And a lot of times it’s not about being literal, it’s about making the essence of this song three-dimensional to you, so that she really exists, and she breathes, and she wears perfume, and what does she look like and how old is she and is she bisexual? Is she on lithium? What is she doing?—Tori Amos
200 Women put a lot of energy into who their man is, what their job is, what stuff they’ve got. But what if you strip that back and try to understand that those are just things? I don’t see a lot of time being put into secrets and shadows and things that live inside our souls—those treasures. —Tori Amos
201 [On the Bösendorfer] It’s a passionate instrument…a sensual instrument…and um, you can hide men in it. —Tori Amos
202 I’m really interested in what you don’t tell me, it’s the things we hold back from ourselves. —Tori Amos
203 I’m too wacky for most weirdos. Who am I to judge?—Tori Amos
204 You don’t have to justify everything. Being pissed off is just absolutely okay. —Tori Amos
205 If you speak strongly about guns and violence and you’ve got kitten heels on, people don’t know what to make of you. It’s funny. —Tori Amos
206 I’m a winter girl. I like coming out when things are desolate and everybody’s ready to slit their wrists. —Tori Amos
207 To me, she [the Bösendorfer] is really the soul of the thing. She gives me courage when I don’t have it. The hard part is that I’m always waiting for the performer to walk through the door. Tonight she hasn’t shown up yet. Sometimes I think, ‘Y’know, it’s five to nine, are you coming?’ And I bought her some really cool shoes today. I have to hope she comes. But when I’m ready to falter, I see that piano from the wings, and the piano looks at me, and winks, and says, ‘The bitch wouldn’t miss this for the world. Just trust.’ And I say okay. —Tori Amos
208 I don’t want to sit on the sidelines and not value the gift of being here. Instead of the idea of time ticking away, the grains of sand running out, I try to think of time as giving me another grain of sand, another gift. So time passing is an accumulation, rather than a diminishing. —Tori Amos
209 I find it amusing [being called "Queen of the Faeries"], and my very cynical British husband finds it extremely amusing. He’s basically said, ‘If anybody badmouths a faery, they’ll get their dick cut off in Cornwall.’ You just don’t do that. It’s like insulting cab drivers in New York. —Tori Amos
210 “I’m crazy,” said Ender, “but I think I’m okay.” —Orson Scott Card
211 In my dad’s study, where he would write his sermon, there was a big black upright that somebody in the church had given my family. I remember crawling up onto this stool—you could wind it and it would get taller—and I would barely reach the keys. I remember feeling that this was my antennae to the galaxy, that I could cross dimensions through sound and hear back from the outer reaches of the universe. I always believed that there was something faster than the speed of light, and that would be thought. And that the universe could exist as a song light-form, and it could impulse little creatures on Earth to hear it, and we could manifest it through our hands onto a three-dimensional instrument. That was how I thought. The songs were alive to me, as alive as the human beings around me that weren’t making a whole lot of sense. But the songs were making sense. —Tori Amos
212 You have to know…what it is that you’re whispering into people’s spines. I believe your spine responds to music in a way that it might not respond to visuals. That sound can reach inside you in a very primal way. I like to create these sonic resorts that people can walk into and never leave their chair. Then they can take it back into their own physical structure. Music is a mirror that lets the listener say, “I can be in the stillness in this two-bar phrase, so I can be in the stillness in my life.” And that might not seem like a lot, but this is how you expand the soul. —Tori Amos
213 Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own stories. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything. —Jane Austen
214 The modern poet…is the inheritor of a melancholy engendered in the mind of the Enlightenment by its skepticism and its own double heritage of imaginative wealth, from the ancients and from the Renaissance masters. —Harold Bloom
215 My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself? —Harold Bloom
216 “House-elves is not supposed to be having fun, Harry Potter,” said Winky with both hands still tightly over her eyes. “House-elves does what they is told.” —JK Rowling
217 One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another. —John Keats
218 The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city. —Italo Calvino
219 Every toy has the right to break. —Antonio Porchia
220 When Vladimir Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson objected. “What’s next?” he said. “Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?” —DG Meyers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880
221 Artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the Oh, how banal. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overincredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. —David Foster Wallace
222 How can I live my life without committing an act with a giant scissors? —Joyce Carol Oates
223 We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their faces away. —Walker Percy
224 The characteristics of all fundamentalism is that it has found absolute certainty—the certainty of class warfare, the certainty of science, or the literal certainty of the Bible—a certainty of the person who has finally found a solid rock to stand upon, which, unlike other rocks, is “solid all the way down.” Fundamentalism, however, is a terminal form of human consciousness in which development has stopped, eliminating the uncertainty and risk that real growth entails. —Heinz Pagels
225 Some teachers try to be very clear, very articulate and that can make it very easy for the logical mind to wrap itself around the words, to comprehend the words and be fooled into believing there is some deeper understanding. On the other hand if the words used are too muddy, obtuse, then there is just useless (as opposed to useful) confusion. Yet to find that middle ground, that “twilight” language where it’s just light enough to see, and just dark enough to not be sure of what is seen, that is an art. —Matthew Files
226 There are dangers…so I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read, less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words. —Virginia Woolf
227 Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats. —HL Mencken
228 A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. —HL Mencken
229 There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. —HL Mencken
230 I suppose that the inferiority of the teachers of [English] is largely due to the fact that they are recruited from the lower moiety of pedagogical aspirants. The more ambitious fellows tackle something that seems more recondite, and hence better worth knowing. [...] The stupider fellow turns to something that is easier and more obvious, which is to say, to the language that every “educated” man is presumed to know, and the books he is presumed to have read….But in English even the higher ranks of professors tend to be inferior to those of any other faculty. The papers printed in [the journals] seldom show any professional competence or contribute anything worth knowing to the subject. For the most part they consist wholly of dull pedantries—attempts to establish the dates of some forgotten poet, investigations of the stealings of one obscure author from another, elaborate statistical inquiries into weak endings, and so on and so on. [...] The men who actually know something always know the difference between something and nothing, but the professors of English seem to be largely unaware of it….they devote themselves ardently to irrelevant trivia about the writers of the past, many of them existing today only as flies embalmed in the amber of text-books. —HL Mencken
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