Drew Kunz > Drew's Quotes

“The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.”
― Edmond Jabès

“Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.”
― Roland Barthes

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”
― Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.”
― Doug Wright, Quills

“That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectivally or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world.What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks

“A soul trembling to sit by a hearth so bright,
To exist again, it’s enough if I borrow from
Your lips the breath of my name you murmur all night.”
― Stéphane Mallarme

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.”
― Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

“Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.”
― Robert Creeley

“It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.”
― John Cage

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”
― Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months
on six lines of poetry?”
― Lorine Niedecker

“You must have me confused with myself”
― Michael Palmer, The Promises of Glass

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”
― John Cage

“I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it.”
― John Cage

“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”
― John Cage

“It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage”
― Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One: 1915-1919

“Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.”
― Louis Zukofsky

“A
Round of fiddles playing Bach.”
― Louis Zukofsky, “A”

“In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“In her dream each of the people assembled around her looked like several others, whom she recognized, only they weren't gradually transformed from one into the other but each of them seemed to be inside the others simultaneously and one of them shone through another. And something else was inside them as well, something unexplainable which wasn't within any of them, whose sum total they appeared to be, and this was what fascinated her above all.”
― Vera Linhartová

“Do not permit the events of your daily lives to bind you, but never withdraw yourselves from them. Only by acting thus can you earn the title of 'A Liberated One'.”
― Huang Po, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind

“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person. ”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.”
― Robbe-Grillet Alain

“There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: 'You see,' he says, 'now that’s formalism.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein