Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

…in the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

Joan Didion, “Why I Became a Cop Hater” (reporting on Chicago 1968)

I began to distrust the baroque obfuscation of language common among the police, began to see it not as an amusing foible but as a quite purposeful barrier between the cop and the enemy. I watched cops caught in stupid lies. I started hearing a tone in police voices, a tone that made no distinction between the criminal and the noncriminal, between the Mafia narcotics dealer and the college boy with two sticks of marijuana in his glove compartment. 'Move on, sister,' the tone said, and 'We aren't running a hotel, lady.' (I was told that by the desk sergeant in a jail where I was trying to arrange bail for a boy who had just been arrested for possession of marijuana. 'We aren't running a hotel, lady,' and then: 'I can give him a message if I feel like giving him a message, not otherwise.') It was a tone calculated—whether by deliberation or reflex—to threaten, to harass, to humiliate, to bully. I read not long ago that the police call this tone, this stance, 'aggressive prevention.' Perhaps all they are preventing is the possibility of their own credibility.

Rebecca Solnit, One Long Year Later: It’s Not Over and We Haven’t Surrendered (Meditations in an Emergency)

The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.

RAIZAN (来山) death poem in tanka form - 1716

Raizan has died
to pay for the mistake
of being born:
for this he blames no one,
and bears no grudge.  

Psychiatrist in Joan Didion, Notes to John

Don't make the mistake of telling her what to do, telling her what she should be doing. You can't teach by telling. Trying to teach by telling is very hard not to do. It seems counterintuitive. It seems to run against human nature. Which is to say it runs against the way we ourselves were taught. This is one of the hardest things to learn when you're being trained as a psychiatrist.

Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

…I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

…

Cormack McCarthy, No Country For Old Men

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Herman Hesse, from Stages

…Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give…

Walter Benjamin, “Post No Bills” from Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

THE WRITER'S TECHNIQUE IN THIRTEEN THESES

1.     Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

2.     Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

3.     In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

4.     Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable. 

5.     Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

6.     Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

7.     Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

8.     Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

9.     Nulla dies sine linea ['No day without a line'] — but there may well be weeks.

10.   Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

11.   Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

12.   Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

13.   The work is the death mask of its conception.

Orson Welles

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Robert Ardrey to AJ Jacobs

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.

Alex Trebek to A.J.Jacobs

I'm curious about everything—even things that don't interest me.

Shakespeare, King John

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

- Constance, ACT III, Sc IV

 

Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"

…
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
...

Noah Davis (painter)

I'd rather fail at painting than be successful at anything else.

Semi Chellas, "Fugue" (1986)

I think about the word "drunk". It is almost onomatopoeic: "drunk" is the sound you make, falling down from being drunk. 

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

     Sundays too my father got up early

     and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

     then with cracked hands that ached

     from labor in the weekday weather made

     banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

     I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

     When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

     and slowly I would rise and dress,

     fearing the chronic angers of that house,

     Speaking indifferently to him,

     who had driven out the cold

     and polished my good shoes as well.

     What did I know, what did I know

     of love's austere and lonely offices?

Galway Kinnell, “Wait”

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven't they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Helene Cixous quoting Kafka in The Gagosian

HANS ULRICH OBRISTAre there any quotes you live by?

HÉLÈNE CIXOUSNo, but what comes to mind is "Man kann doch nicht nicht-leben" [One cannot not-live]. That's Kafka.

Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, their rules for living from an interview with her

OK, so the first one is: Don't be afraid of anyone. If you can imagine: living your life, you're not afraid of anyone. That's number one.

Number two is you get a really good bullshit detector, and you learn how to use it. You know, just: "Is that really happening or not?"

Third is to be really, really tender. And with those, you're covered.

Marshall McLuhan

• I wouldn't have seen it, if I didn't believe it. 

André Alexis, “Houyhnhnms”

Most great things take time to happen. So do catastrophe.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Franz Xavier Kappus

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

"Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they finally found out what it was?"

"I missed that," I murmured.

"I saw that," said Sandra. "About two days ago."

"What is the secret of life?" I aksed.

"I forget," said Sandra.

"Protein," the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein."

"Yeah," said Sandra, "that's it."

Edna St Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

[via Austin Kleon]

Mary Oliver, "Don't Hesitate"

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that's often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

 

Goethe, Faust

I see my discourse leaves you cold;
Dear kids, I do not take offense;
Recall: the Devil, he is old,
Grow old yourselves, and he'll make sense!

Annie Ernaux, The Years

And one day we'll appear in our children's memories, among their grandchildren, and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history. 

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

Anne Sexton, "Yellow"

When they turn the sun
on again I'll plant children
under it, I'll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing. I'll
take my bones and polish them, I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I'll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we'll go on
won't we?
 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Vaclav Havel

The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Via Rebecca Solnit - Hope in the Dark

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Ted Chiang in the New Yorker

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as "money laundering for copyrighted data," which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there's no guilt associated with it because it's not clear even to you that you're copying.

Philip Larkin

on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

John D. MacDonald, The Drowner

I was so low I could walk under a gator without taking off my hat.

Yael van de Woudon, The Safekeep

That's what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never find out anything new about them ever.

James Baldwin in Life Magazine, May 1963

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.

[via James Clear]

C.S.Lewis, The Four Loves

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. 

(via James Clear)

Ron Padgett, "The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World"

What makes us so mean?

We are meaner than gorillas,

the ones we like to blame our genetic aggression on.

It is in our nature to hide behind what Darwin said about survival,

as if survival were the most important thing on earth.

It isn't.

...

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Frida Kahlo, letter

Frankly, I don't have the least ambition to be anybody. I don't care for people's pretentiousness, and I am in no way interested in becoming a "big shit."

Frida Kahlo
Letter to Dr. Leo Eloesser
15th March 1941

—Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera, by Gerry Souter

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night

We read books to find out who we are.

 

Arthur Weasley, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

David Simon, The Wire

Come at the king, you best not miss.
— Omar

June Leaf



Jane Leaf