Rather than offer a list of this or that, an end-of-year ritual which is usually hierarchical, I shall fill up this space with everyone tied for first place. About five years ago I started a page of well-chosen words from others. My list of quotes is now long enough to be a book in itself. I have no right to hoard these gems. Here are a few:
You’ve got to have
something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for
any damn body’s sermon on how to behave. -Billie Holiday
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The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.
-George Marshall, US Army Chief, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense,
Nobel laureate (31 Dec 1880-1959)
All
art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. -Federico
Fellini, film director, and writer (20 Jan 1920-1993)
Charles Simic said: “If I believe in anything,
it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its
church.”
In the end, the poem is not a thing we
see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see--and what we see is life.
-Robert Penn Warren, novelist and poet (24 Apr 1905-1989)
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Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for
Wordsworth.” Phillip Larkin
"Between two evils, I like to pick the one
I haven't tried before." Mae West
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Adrienne Rich said, "Poetry
is the liquid voice that can wear through stone."
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It is necessary to write,
if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over
the butterfly of the moment?" Vita Sackville-West
"There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army." John Ashbury
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A man needs to love and to hate at the same
moment, / to laugh and cry with the same eyes, / with the same hands to throw
stones and to gather them, / to make love in war and war in love."
Yehuda Amichai
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No, no, you're not
thinking, you're just being logical. -Niels Bohr, physicist
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Someone is Hindu,
someone is Muslim, someone is Christian / Everyone is hell-bent on not becoming
a human being. -Nida Fazli, poet
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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (15 Oct 1844-1900)
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She: Tweeting is an art form
He: It isn’t art If it’s evil
She: It’s only art if
it’s evil……………….Patricia Lockwood
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"Poetry is, above
all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born
out of one's person's solitude, it is a bridge between separated souls."
Brendan Kennelly
Barry Hannah said, “I loved the life, the
secret life, of the typewriter when the house was quiet… Writers maybe just
stare, like cows — just staring. Most people don’t stare. A writer is unembarrassed
to just keep looking.”
"Historical sense and poetic sense should
not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make,
history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake."
Robert Penn Warren
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Lionel Barrymore, who once said, “Half the people in Hollywood are dying
to be discovered and the other half are afraid they will be.”
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"Our full humanity is contingent on our hospitality; we
can be complete only when we are giving something away; when we sit at the
table and pass the peas to the person next to us we see that person in a whole
new way." Alice Waters
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The eye
teaches skepticism, the eyelid teaches faith.
Stanley Cavell
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Charles Simic said, “I
write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can’t get it right.
I write because I want every woman in the world to fall in love with me.”
When asked how one should
prepare for a life in poetry, Charles Simic answered, “There’s no preparation
for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book
of philosophy in one’s pocket would serve as well as any university.”
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I imagine one of the reasons people
cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone,
they will be forced to deal with pain. -James Baldwin, writer (2 Aug 1924-19
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Be regular and orderly in your life so
that you may be violent and original in your work. -Gustave Flaubert, novelist
(12 Dec 1821-1880)
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If I were a giraffe, I would love you in silence, gazing down at you from over the wire fencing, as melancholy as a dockyard crane, I would love you with the awkward love of the very tall, and, thoughtfully chewing a leaf as if it were gum, ………, I would slowly lower my neck on the pulleys of my tendons in order, tenderly, tremulously, to nuzzle your breasts with my head. From Lobo Antunes, “Land at the End of the World”
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