David Anthony Sam > David's Quotes

“Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“Edwards’s stark presentation of the immanent consciousness of Separation enters the structure of her poems. Each word is a cipher, through its sensible sign another sign hidden. The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards’ listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. This re-ordering of the forward process of reading is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters among the most original writing of her century.”
― Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson

“When the body dies, where will they go, those migrant birds and prayer calls, as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer? With voices of the ones I loved, great loves and small loves, train wheels, crickets, clock-ticks, thunder – where will they, when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“What is memory but a story about how we have lived?”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“It’s a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“Don’t go in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. Poets return to the MOON immemorially; it is deeply compelling and we probably won’t ever get done with it. The challenge is to look at the familiar without the expected scaffolding of seeing, and the payoff is that such a gaze feels enormously rewarding; it wakes us up, when the old verities are dusted off, the tired approaches set aside.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“Be ignited, or be gone.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume Two

“Clarity, especially in poetry, requires conceiving of your work as a collaborative act of imagination with the audience, thus affording them the deepest respect.”
― Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations

“They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.”
― Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations

“Not showing themselves, they shine forth. Not justifying themselves, they’re self-evident. Not praising themselves, they’re accomplished. Not competing, they have in all the world no competitor.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way

“Anyone who doesn’t respect a teacher or cherish a student may be clever, but has gone astray.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way

“Barbara Tuchman wrote, “Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“Voltaire playfully wrote, “Ice-cream is exquisite—what a pity it isn’t illegal.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“I rather take this quality to spring from a very common infirmity of human nature, inclining us to be most curious and conceited in matters where we have least concern, and for which we are least adapted by study or nature.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: with original color illustrations by Arthur Rackham

“The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: with original color illustrations by Arthur Rackham

“An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“To have done work which is widely recognized, to have gained the sincere esteem of many and the real love of even a few, surely these are sufficient reasons to look on life as well worth the living.”
― Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

“Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”
― Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“Woolf was breaking new ground in the way she rendered consciousness and her understanding of human subjectivity.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography

“We can only begin to live when we conceive life as
Tragedy.”
― William Butler Yeats