"Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'"
— Billy Collins

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"
— Emily Dickinson

"O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!
Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villian!
-Juliet 3.2. VS 79"
— William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

"A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."
— Randall Jarell

"I never avoid something that challenges my guts and my heart. While I might occasionally puke my guts out, I have never puked my heart out."
— Michael Scott

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"
— Abraham Lincoln

"The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop."
— Mark Twain

"Some people see things that are and ask, Why?
Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?
Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that."
— George Carlin

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
— Orson Welles

"Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. "
— Pete Seeger

"Deadlines just aren't real to me until I'm staring one in the face. "
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"Does it look like I'm holding a Barbeque?
No
THEN WHY ARE YOU ALL UP IN MY GRILL?"
— Lisi Harrison (Revenge of the Wannabes)

"Brain : I shall pollute the water supply with this DNAdefibuliser, turning everyone into mindless slaves.
Pinky : What about the people who drink bottled water?
Brain : Pinky, people who pay 5 dollars for a bottle of water are already mindless slaves.
"
— (From Cartoon Pinky and the Brain)

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva"
— Josh Groban

"I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them."
— Mark Twain

"The center snaps the ball to the quarterback!"
"No he doesn't!"
"He doesn't?"
"NO! Secretly, he's the quarterback for the other team! He keeps the ball!"
"A traitor!"
"Calvin breaks for the goal."
"Wheeee! He's at the 30... the 20... the 10! Nobody can catch him!"
"Nobody wants to! Your running toward your own goal!"
"Huh?!"
"When I learned that you were a spy, I switched goals. This is your goal and mine's hidden!"
"Hidden?!"
"You'll never find it in a million years!"
"I don't need to find it as a traitor to your team, crossing my goal counts as crossing your goal!"
"Ah, so you might think so..."
"In fact, I know so!"
"But the place I hid my goal is right on top of your goal, so the points will go to me!"
"But the fact is, I'm really a double agent! I'm on your team after all, which means you'll lose points if I cross your goal! Ha ha!"
"But I'm a traitor too, so I'm really on your team! I want you to cross my goal! The points will go to your team, which is really my team!"
"That would be true... if I were a football player!"
"You mean...?"
"I'm actually a badminton player disguised as a double-agent football player!!"
"And I'm actually a volleyball-croquet-polo player!"
"Sooner or later, all our games turn into CalvinBall."
"No cheating!"
— Bill Watterson

"Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it."
— Lemony Snicket (The End)

"...I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time."
— Leonard Bernstein

"Some are born weird, some achieve it, others have weirdness thrust upon them."
— Dick Francis (To the Hilt)

"I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly."
— Steven Wright

"You can't make footprints in the sands of time if you're sitting on your butt. And who wants to make buttprints in the sands of time?"
— Bob Moawad

"Wikipedia is the first place I go when I'm looking for knowledge... or when I want to create some."
— Stephen Colbert

"I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.
-Tibby"
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone."
— e.e. cummings

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
— Paul Theroux

"Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground."
— Judith Thurman

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
— Mary Anne Radmacher

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance."
— George Bernard Shaw

"We are all ordinary people. But even an ordinary secretary, or a housewife, or a teenager can within their own small ways turn on a small light in a dark room."
— The Freedom Writers

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
— Benjamin Franklin

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: "Go down again - I dwell among the people."
— John Henry Newman

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

"21. In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.


"
— Anthony Robbins

"Life isn't worth living unless you have a jug or two of good orange juice in your fridge."
— Alexandra Sullivan

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
— Tom Clancy

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
— Laozi

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money."
— Jules Renard

"... criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require _practice_, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off)."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien)

"A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her."
— Max Lucado

"“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.""
— Pablo Picasso

"As it turns out, now is the moment you've been waiting for."
— Lucinda Williams

"Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance."
— Stephen R. Covey

"We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand."
— Paulo Coelho