T. E. Lawrence

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

 

 

James Baldwin, “Me and My House”

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.

Leo Tolstoy

Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

Sean & Abigail Bengson "The Keep Going On Song"

I pray my rage is fire & it cleans my mind out
so I can listen…
we don't know we don't know we are making this up as we go

Stanley Plumly, "At Night"

When did I know that I'd have to cary it around
in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket

the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
added to, handful by handful if necessary, until

the way my mother would sit all night in a room
without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?

...

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Phillip Larkin, "Days"

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor   

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Malcolm Gladwell

The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.

De Medicina – Aulus Cornelius Celsus c25 B.C – 50 A.D.

Live in rooms full of light.  Avoid heavy food.  Be moderate in drinking of wine.  Take massage, baths, exercise and gymnastics.  Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water.  Change surroundings and take long journeys.  Strictly avoid frightening ideas.  Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements.  Listen to music

Rebecca Traister, "The Only Strategy Left for Democrats"

It is not nefarious to make people's lives better in the hope that they will keep you in power so that you can continue to make their lives better: that's actually a healthy view of how a government and its people might ideally operate.

Father Daniel Berrigan on Dorothy Day

She lived as though the truth were true.

Gertude Stein

Everybody gets so much information all day that they lose their common sense.

Hieu Minh Nguyen, "The New Decade"

…

If you were here we'd dance, I think.

If you were here, you'd know what to do

what to do with all this time

Horace, Odes I, ii, "How to Live" (65-8 BC)

Don't waste your time, Leucónoe, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisible future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens. Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine; the days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.

Phillip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

David Byrne, “This Must Be the Place”

We drift in and out
Sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view

Suzanne Moore

I was always somehow inappropriate. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas said, dirt is "matter out of place". Matter out of place. 

Joan Didion, “On Self Respect”

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

Sharon Olds, "35/10"

Brushing out my daughter's dark
silken hair before the mirror
I see the gray gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, gold and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It's an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.

Roxane Gay, NYT Op Ed

Here's the thing about anger. We only seem to prioritize one kind — anger in reaction to progress. And we never seem to acknowledge the anger rising out of oppression, marginalization, and under representation.

Laurie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here"

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, after- ward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon return'ing make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is neces- sarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in. 

John Armstrong, John Aikin (1804). “The Art of Preserving Health”

Distrust yourself, and sleep before you fight, 

'Tis not too late tomorrow to be brave.

Rumi, "The Divers Clothes Lying Empty on the Beach"

You're sitting here with us, but you're also out walking
in a field at dawn. You are yourself
the animal we hunt when you come with us on the hunt.
You're in your body like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you're wind. You're the diver's clothes
lying empty on the beach. You're the fish.
...

Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Billy Colllin, "Momento Mori"

It doesn't take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children's party.

Jerry Seinfeld OpEd 24 August 2020

Wipe your tears, wipe your butt and pull it together.

James Baldwin, "Giovanni's Room"

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Dionne Brand, July 2020

This we fear — this we know — that all of our thoughts will be rushed into editorial pages, used up in committee meetings; all the rich imaginings of activists and thinkers who urge us to live otherwise may be disappeared, modified into reform and inclusion, equity, diversity and palliation.

But I hear what they say and many others do as well, "Look we should never live the way we lived before; our lives need not be framed by the purely extractive, based on nothing but capital." Everything is up in the air, all narratives for the moment have been blown open — the statues are falling — all the metrics are off, if only briefly. 

Winston Churchill

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.

De Medicina — Aulus Cornelius Celsus 25 B.C — 50 A.D.

Live in rooms full of light. Avoid heavy food. Be moderate in drinking of wine. Take massage, baths, exercise and gymnastics. Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water. Change surroundings and take long journeys. Strictly avoid frightening ideas. Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements. Listen to music.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

There's something almost tedious about disaster. Don't you find? I mean, at first it's all dramatic, 'Oh my God, the economy's collapsing' … but then that keeps happening, it just keeps collapsing, week after week.

Langstone Hughes

…
She, Within herself,
Found loveliness,
Through the soul's own mastery.
...

Dean Young, "Delphiniums in a Window Box"

…

Did you see the meteor shower?
Did it feel like something swallowed?
Every question, conversation
even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,
because of you I'm talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers' market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.

Cornelia Funke

We all know from fairy tales, you can never say no to impossible tasks. 

G. K. Chesterton

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men—men like Shakespeare or Browning.

Patti Smith

I just did my thing. I just plowed through it. Whether people liked me or not, I just went ahead and did what I was doing.

Jenny Holzer

Any surplus is immoral.

Lolo Goldbach, "Birthday Poem for Daddy", August 2018

Every year, you feel pure.
It's your day; it's free to play.
You have a birthday every year -
You're older,
And that's sincere.

Blake, "The Voice of the Devil"

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

Tracy Morgan, quoted in The New Yorker

I don't feel pressure — I apply pressure.

Horace Walpole

When men write for profit, they cannot afford to be delicate.

Gillian Rose, Love's Work

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.