Aaron Traister

We talk about our marriages so seriously and with such reverence; we talk about our sex or lack thereof in the same way. Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe we shouldn't treat the institution and its dirty little companion as some sort of precious Fabergé egg that is either shattered and worthless or pristine, untouchable and priceless. Maybe it's more like Silly Putty and the plastic egg it comes in. Sometimes the egg is open, allowing for hours of stretchy, flexible fun; sometimes the egg is closed and kind of boring, but as long as the Silly Putty remains inside the egg it's still full of as much potential as your imagination allows, and the value of the egg is not diminished no matter how often or vigorously the egg or its contents are fingered or played with. (And yes, I was staring at a Silly Putty egg on my dining room table when I came up with that extended metaphor.)

Wallace Shawn, The Fever

What do you think a human being is? A human being happens to be an unprotected little wriggling creature ... Without a shell or a hide or even fur, just thrown out onto the earth like an eye that's been pulled from its socket! Like a shucked oyster that's trying to crawl along the ground.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Joan Didion, "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.

Warren Buffett

You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.

Henry King, "Exequy on his Wife"

...By thy clear sun
My love and fortune first did run;
But thou wilt never more appear
Folded within my hemisphere,
Since both thy light and motion,
Like a fled star, is fall'n and gone,
And 'twixt me and my soul's dear wish
The earth now interposed is....

Masahide (17th Century Japanese poet)

Barn's burnt down --
Now I can see the moon.

Barack Obama, Victory Speech

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

St. Augustine in prayer

Make me perfect ... But not yet.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Margaret Mead

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Ron Sures, Dinner Conversation

The best thing about getting older is that a man's libido is finally in sync with his emotions.

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Money ... has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Paris, April 1, 1922"

A mile of clean sand.
I will write my name here, and the trouble that is in my heart.
I will write the name & place of my birth,
What I was to be,
And what I am.
I will write my forty sins, my thousand follies,
My four unspeakable acts. . . .
I will write the names of the cities I have fled from,
The names of men & women I have wronged.
I will write the holy name of her I serve,
And how I serve her ill.
And I will sit on the beach & let the tide come in.
I will watch with peace the great calm tongue of the tide
Licking from the sand the unclean story of my heart.

Lisel Mueller, "The Blind Leading the Blind"

...
There are a thousand turnoffs. I have been here before.
Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold.
Once I stumbled on murder, the thin parts of a girl.
Walk on, keep walking, there are axes above us.
Watch for the occasional bits and bubbles of light ?
Birthdays for you, recognitions: yourself, another.
...

Lyndon Baines Johnson

A president's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Despair has its own calms.

Dakin Lecakes, "The Way"

From here to there

From near to far

From dark to light

There is a way

And I have trod

That path in dreams

And always you

Are there with me

And I am here

And you are near

And I will show

To you the way

From this to that

From first to last

From tears to joy

There is a way

Through the rain

And I have felt

The cleansing shower

Of water falls

And I am here

And you are there

And I will show

To you the way

My hand is open

Put your hand there

And let us walk

Into the rain

Together

I will take you there

Barack Obama

Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts.

J. P. Morgan

A man has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself -- there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold."

"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."

Pablo Neruda, "If You Forget Me"

...
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

...
Ahora bien,
si poco a poco dejas de quererme
dejaré de quererte poco a poco.

Si de pronto
me olvidas
no me busques,
que ya te habré olvidado.

Si consideras largo y loco
el viento de banderas
que pasa por mi vida
y te decides
a dejarme a la orilla
del corazón en que tengo raíces,
piensa
que en ese día,
a esa hora
levantaré los brazos
y saldrán mis raíces
a buscar otra tierra.

Pero
si cada día,
cada hora
sientes que a mí estás destinada
con dulzura implacable.
Si cada día sube
una flor a tus labios a buscarme,
ay amor mío, ay mía,
en mí todo ese fuego se repite,
en mí nada se apaga ni se olvida,
mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada,
y mientras vivas estará en tus brazos
sin salir de los míos.

Jacques Brel

Because everybody's tooth aches in the same way, everybody loves their mother, everybody loves or hates spinach. And those are the things that really count.

Max Ehrmann, 1927

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

Peter Wellington, "The Stoned Diaries"

Every complaint actually means -- I can't believe this is happening and I'm going to die.

Adam Phillips, "Worrying and Its Discontents"

Worrying is an ironic form of hope.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Like so many other things, people have also misunderstood the position love has in life; they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure are more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, precisely because it is the supreme happiness, can be nothing other than work. —So those who love must try to act as if they had a great work to accomplish: they must be much alone and go into themselves and gather and concentrate themselves; they must work; they must become something.

Shakespeare, As You Like It

I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey. I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are dispos'd to be merry. I will laugh like a hyen, and that when thou art inclin'd to sleep.

— Rosalind

Spinoza

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

Nick Flynn, "The Ticking Is The Bomb"

Thich Nhat Hahn says it is a mistake to say, "The rain is falling," to say, "The wind is blowing." What is rain if it is not falling? he asks. What is wind if it is not blowing? The falling is the rain, the blowing is the wind. The next day, in the tree, I bring it up. He's talking about impermanence, someone says. It's the same reason we climb trees, someone else offers -- it's that we were once monkeys.

Shakespeare, Hamlet Vii

... in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Triumph of Life"

A light of heaven, whose half-extinguished beam

Through the sick day in which we wake to weep
Glimmers, for ever sought, for ever lost ...

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Triumph of Life"

... why God made irreconcilable
Good and the means of good.

Ginzberg called his body ...

... this clock of meat.

Fredrich Holderlin

For where
The gods require fences or markers
To indicate their path,
Or need a pool to bathe,
The hearts of men
Beat like fire.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mont Blanc"

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, -- that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live. -- I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? Or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around unaccessibly
Its circles?

The Song of Solomon, King James translation

My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

Shakespeare, Othello

What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

Hannah Arendt

[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Stanley Kubrick

Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

Mahatma Gandhi

There is nothing that wastes the body like worry.

Henry David Thoreau

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Saul Bellow, "Seize the Day"

And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence — I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.

Bertrand Russell

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Roberto Bolaño

Then what is writing of quality? Well, what it's always been: to know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.

Shirley Hazzard, "Transit of Venus"

Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they are made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self.

Colette

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

Louise Erdrich, "Advice to Myself"

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That c loset stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Tennessee Williams

For love I make characters in plays.

William S. Burroughs

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.