Michael Staten > Michael's Quotes

“The pattern for keeping this place
we must take from the woods, if
the land is to thrive in our using
...
---The woods
is a great life of many lives
living upon its many deaths.
It flourishes in the dark crypts
of its decay.
...
---To the teachable
it is a teaching, not a syllabus
of processes and nomenclature
reduced to human understanding, but
the presence of the world being
made, a fabric of interdependent wonders,
moment by moment completed in beauty,
leaf shadows on light leaves moving.”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“Will the robotic tree perform
the original miracle, transforming
light into life?”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“The horsewife! The very basebone of the American plethora! The horsewife! Without whom the entire structure of civilian life would crumble! Without the horsewife, the whole raison d'être of our existences would be reduced, in a twinkling, to that brute level of brutality for which we so rightly reproach the filthy animals. Were it not for her enormous purchasing power and the heedless gaiety with which it is exercised, we would still be going around dressed in skins probably, with no big ticket items to fill the empty voids, in our homes and in our hearts. The horsewife! Nut and numen of our intersubjectivity. The horsewife! The chiefest ornament on the golden tree of human suffering!”
― Donald Barthelme, Snow White

“You and I will always be friends."

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“...estou que muita mais gente poria termo aos seus dias, se pudesse achar essa espécie de cocaína moral dos bons livros”
― Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro

“Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas

“I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.”
― Paul Harding, Tinkers

“I imagined I had discovered a new word. I rise up in bed and say, "It is not in the language; I have discovered it. 'Kuboa.' It has letters as a word has. By the benign God, Man you have discovered a word!... 'Kuboa' ... a word of profound import.

[...]

Some minutes pass over, and I wax nervous; this new word torments me unceasingly, returns again and again, takes up my thoughts, and makes me serious. I had fully formed an opinion as to what it should not signify, but had come to no conclusion as to what it should signify.

[...]

Then it seems to me that some one is interposing, interrupting my confab. I answer angrily, "Beg pardon! You match in idiocy is not to be found; no, sir! Knitting cotton? Ah! go to hell!" Well, really I had to laugh. Might I ask why should I be forced to let it signify knitting cotton, when I had a special dislike to its signifying knitting cotton?”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.”
― Paul Harding

“...when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination" --above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it.”
― Marianne Moore

“The reasaon I'm shy of objects is because I like them. I transfer the thoughts that are against me onto them. Then these thoughts go away, unless I talk about them - just like my wariness of people. Maybe it all collects in your hair.

After I separated from my husband, in the quiet days when no one was shouting at me anymore, I started noticing other people's wariness of strangers. I saw how they combed their hair in public. In the factory, in the city, in the streets, and trams, buses, and trains, while waiting in front of a counter or standing in a line for milk and bread. People comb their hair at the movies before the light goes out, and even in the cemetery. While they're parting their hair you can see their wariness of others collecting in their combs. But they can't comb it out completely if they go on talking about it. The fear of strangers sticks to the comb and makes it greasy. People who talk about it can't get rid of their fear of strangers; their combs are always clean.”
― Herta Müller, The Appointment

“Hey, not while I'm at my devotions, no so fast, the fat man said, inside the shithouse you're communing with God, and outside you find that all hell's broken loose.”
― Herta Müller, The Appointment

“But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence.”
― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

“My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.”
― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

“It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I said, smiling very wide and droogie: ‘Well, if it isn’t fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.’ And then we started.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“...y a partir de ese golpe el alma en pena del registrador civil contaría su historia, en todo momento con las palmas de sus manos sin dedos apretando las dos mitades de su cabeza para mantener los sesos en su sitio, que el realismo mágico no me es por completo ajeno.”
― Horacio Castellanos Moya, Senselessness

“...the older she grew the more she came to recognize falsehood as the preservative that allowed the world to maintain its shape.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Lying was as easy as saying nothing.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“But ain’t that how we learn to be ourselves? Failing to impress them that matter most to us?”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
― Plato, The Republic

“...if you didn't know clearly what holiness and unholiness are there's no way that you would have taken it upon yourself to prosecute your father...
-Euthyphro”
― Plato, The Trail And Death Of Socrates