Ella Wheeler Wilcox, "Protest"

To sin by silence when we should protest 
makes cowards out of men. The human race 
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised 
Against injustice, ignorance and lust, 
The inquisition yet would serve the law. 
And guillotines decide our least disputes. 
The few who dare must speak and speak again, 
To right the wrongs of many.

Wislawa Szymborska: The Turn of the Century

It was supposed to be better than the others, our 20th century, 
But it won't have time to prove it. 
Its years are numbered, 
its step unsteady, 
its breath short. 

Already too much has happened 
that was not supposed to happen. 
What was to come about 
has not. 

Spring was to be on its way, 
and happiness, among other things. 

Fear was to leave the mountains and valleys. 
The truth was supposed to finish before the lie. 

Certain misfortunes 
were never to happen again 
such as war and hunger and so forth. 

These were to be respected: 
the defenselessness of the defenseless, 
trust and the like. 

Whoever wanted to enjoy the world 
faces an impossible task. 

Stupidity is not funny. 
Wisdom isn't jolly. 

Hope 
Is no longer the same young girl 
et cetera. Alas. 

God was at last to believe in man: 
good and strong, 
but good and strong 
are still two different people. 

How to live -- someone asked me this in a letter, 
someone I had wanted 
to ask that very thing. 

Again and as always, 
and as seen above 
there are no questions more urgent 
than the naive ones. 
 

Trevor Noah

When I was learning how to box, that was the number one thing my trainer taught me. He said, 'You can't get angry at every single time I hit you because that's why you're here. You're going to get hit. Acknowledge that you're going to get hit and now focus on how you're going to fight properly.' And living through the times is exactly the right way to put it because I have seen a slice of this only on a different continent

Jennifer Pahlka, founder Code for America

It's supposed to be hard. We are in this together. It is up to us.

Theodore Roosevelt

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

W.H. Auden - In Memory of W. B. Yeats

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902

Our movement is belated, and like all things too long postponed, now gets on everybody's nerves. 

Dorothy Parker, "Sanctuary"

My land is bare of chattering folk;
The clouds are low along the ridges,
And sweet's the air with curly smoke
From all my burning bridges.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Tyler Brewington, Calling the Water

once I stepped barefoot into something flyblown

it was a great lesson in inattention

Richard Brautigan, Watermelon Sugar

Megan Smith, United States CTO

Go where you are rare.

George Eliot

"You must love your work and not be always looking over the edge of it...You must not be ashamed of your work and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else."

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

Ellen Bass, "Enough"

          Enough seen….Enough had....Enough…
                                       —Arthur Rimbaud

No. It will never be enough. Never
enough wind clamoring in the trees,
sun and shadow handling each leaf, never enough clang
of my neighbor hammering,
the iron nails, relenting wood, sound waves
lapping over roofs, never enough
bees purposeful at the throats
of lilies. How could we be replete
with the flesh of ripe tomatoes, the unique
scent of their crushed leaves. It would take many
births to be done with the thatness of that.

Oh blame life. That we just want more.
Summer rain. Mud. A cup of tea.
Our teeth, our eyes. A baby in a stroller.
Another spoonful of crème brûlée, sweet burnt crust crackling.
And hot showers, oh lovely, lovely hot showers.

Today was a good day.
My mother-in-law sat on the porch, eating crackers and cheese
with a watered-down margarita
and though her nails are no longer stop-light red
and she can’t remember who’s alive and dead,
still, this was a day
with no weeping, no unstoppable weeping.

Last night, through the small window of my laptop,
I watched a dying man kill himself in Switzerland.
He wore a blue shirt and snow was falling
onto a small blue house, onto dark needles of pine and fir.
He didn’t step outside to feel the snow on his face.
He sat at a table with his wife and drank poison.

Online I found a plastic bag complete with Velcro
and a hole for a tube to a propane tank. I wouldn’t have to
move our Weber. I could just slide
down the stucco to the flagstones, where the healthy
weeds are sprouting through the cracks.
Maybe it wouldn’t be half-bad
to go out looking at the yellowing leaves of the old camellia.
And from there I could see the chickens scratching—
if we still have chickens then. And yet…

this little hat of life, how will I bear
to take it off while I can still reach up? Snug woolen watch cap,
lacy bonnet, yellow cloche with the yellow veil
I wore the Easter I turned thirteen when my mother let me promenade
with Tommy Spagnola on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

Oxygen, oxygen, the cry of the body—and you always want to give it
what it wants. But I must say no—
enough, enough
with more tenderness
than I have ever given to a lover, the gift
of the nipple hardening under my fingertip, more
tenderness than to my newborn,
when I held her still flecked
with my blood. I’ll say the most gentle refusal
to this dear dumb animal and tighten
the clasp around my throat that once was kissed and kissed
until the blood couldn’t rest in its channel, but rose
to the surface like a fish that couldn’t wait to be caught.

C. D. Wright, Op Ed

I believe in a hardheaded art, an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one’s own faith in the word in one’s own obstinate terms. I believe the word was made good from the start; it remains so to this second. I believe words are golden as goodness is golden. Even the humble word brush gives off a scratch of light. There is not much poetry from which I feel barred, whether it is arcane or open in the extreme. I attempt to run the gamut because I am pulled by the extremes. I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world. I hold to hard distinctions of right and wrong.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/postscript-c-d-wright-1949-2016

Collette sez

Who said you should be happy? Do your work.

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, letter from Paris to a potential benefactor c. 1927

I want to work. This is no vain ideal that I am favoring myself with, no distraction through which I seek to make life more agreeable and time pass more quickly, but a fire that burns in me, a force which compels my obedience and I am only obeying a command which is stronger than myself, even in the face of what may seem discouraging conditions. I cannot stop, I must go on.

Someday people will realize that this is my medium of expression, that it is still possible to say something through sculpture, that a sculptor may yet live again.

I do not complain of difficulties. I am not afraid to face them, the contraire...

I must continue to work. People like my things and if they like them shall I not someday be able to take care of myself? I want to. I expect that of myself, shall respect myself more when I can, but at this moment I seem not to be able to, and I am sad, almost ashamed to ask. ...What more can I say? I want to work, I want to work. I must work. I live for that alone.

Forgive me I beg you for writing like this, for I[']m driven to desperation.

Miller Williams, The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina

Somewhere in everyone's head something points toward home,
a dashboard's floating compass, turning all the time
to keep from turning. It doesn't matter how we come
to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes
the way it went once, where nothing holds fast
to where it belongs, or what you've risen or fallen to.

What the bubble always points to,
whether we notice it or not, is home.
It may be true that if you move fast
everything fades away, that given time
and noise enough, every memory goes
into the blackness, and if new ones come-

small, mole-like memories that come
to live in the furry dark-they, too,
curl up and die. But Carol goes
to high school now. John works at home
what days he can to spend some time
with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.

Ellen won't eat her breakfast.
Your sister was going to come
but didn't have the time.
Some mornings at one or two
or three I want you home
a lot, but then it goes.

It all goes.
Hold on fast
to thoughts of home
when they come.
They're going to
less with time.

Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.

Forgive me that. One time it wasn't fast.
A myth goes that when the years come
then you will, too. Me, I'll still be home.

Hemingway, letter to Janet Flanner 1933

The only way, I suppose, is to find out what women are going to write memoirs, and try to get them with child.

Robert Herrick, "Delight in Disorder"

A sweet disorder in the dress Kindles in clothes a wantonness; A lawn about the shoulders thrown Into a fine distraction; An erring lace which here and there Enthrals the crimson stomacher; A cuff neglectful, and thereby Ribbons to flow confusedly; A winning wave (deserving note) In the tempestuous petticoat; A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility; Do more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part.

Albert Einstein

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. 

Sean Morley Dixon, "In the Movies"

Till a man comes along from... builds a marquis up above, um... sets up a booth, sells tickets to our youth... 'Cause we're young, and we're young. But for me, though, it's much different from that No matter what I do, I will always be old...

Colette

Who said you should be happy? Do your work.

Marshall McLuhan (1972)

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Flaubert

Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d'être violent et original dans vos œuvres.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from "Love Is Not All"

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Pablo Neruda, from Sonnet XVII

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

Rainer W. Fassbinder

The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

David Mamet in Wired Magazine

Some tree hugger, and it might have been Emerson, said that if every man just acted in his own best interests, this would be paradise on Earth.

This is the sentiment of one who has never been punched in the nose.

Jonathan Wallace, "Lying"

The reason that I hate lies is because, like you, I wish to navigate carefully through life, and to do so I must be able to calculate my true position. When you lie to me, you know your position but you have given me false data which obscures mine.

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You

Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.

Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy

One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other.

Richard Hughes

Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults.

Bill Moyers, The Journal

BILL MOYERS: Action. I mean, don't you think? I mean, hope is actually- toxic. If you hold it long enough without some resolution.

BARRY LOPEZ: I would say yes. I would affirm that you have to have action. But I think the virtue that is, that we-- you know, there are certain things that people say you shouldn't talk about, because it makes people nervous.

The things that make us uncomfortable in public are a person who wishes to speak of what is beautiful. That makes everybody a little bit nervous, because many of us keep this jaded, cynical separateness with the world, because we're cautious. We're cautious. How many people do you know whose crying out is for intimacy? They want to be known. They want to be touched. But they can't make that intimate connection without being vulnerable. You have to be vulnerable in order to achieve this exchange of intimacy. And you can't be vulnerable unless you can trust the situation. And what we're learning, many of us, is the world is not trustworthy enough for you to be vulnerable to it and gain that intimacy.

Another thing that makes people nervous is if you speak of faith, because immediately people think, Christian faith? Or Islamic faith? Or what kind of faith are you talking about? I'm not talking about any of those. I am talking about the belief in other people. The faith-- when I have been in situations that are dangerous, physically dangerous, you know, in Antarctica or, you know, diving underneath ice down there, for example, which I did for awhile.

My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who've been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we're living in, I put my faith in those people. And so, the word that has come alive for me in recent months is to have faith in each other.

Walt Whitman, The Swimmers

(It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.)

Dwight Eisenhower

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

Jack London

I would rather be ashes than dust.

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.