Peter Schmidt > Peter's Quotes

“...the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark,” Baldwin said in an interview in 1961. “Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”
― Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

“illustrations of anthropomorphic piles of resin with dialogue bubbles above them: “Hello there, I’m Frankincense. Well, technically I’m Frankincense’s monster, but everyone gets that wrong.” One”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“my two primary sleep aids, Behemoth and a YouTube recording of a vacuum cleaner, the Hoover WindTunnel. I don’t know why I find the sound comforting, Doc, when I was a child in Cairo, my afternoon naps coincided with the rhythmic beating of carpets outside the bedroom, I was used to sleeping to that sound, but no one beat carpets anymore, a shame, though lo and behold, I found that not only did a vacuum cleaner remove dirt more effectively, it summoned Hypnos just as well as a beating, and there were twelve-hour-long recordings of all kinds of household machines online, welcome to America, now go to sleep. Maybe”
― Rabih Alameddine, The Angel of History

“Satan said, You are a temp in life.”
― Rabih Alameddine, The Angel of History

“Abraham Lincoln, said, just before his assassination: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
― Jack London, The Iron Heel

“Mrs Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen. No, she thought, it’s not like a Greek centaur. Not in the least. From the shoulders slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water,”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside—jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“Parents were the ones who handed you law school admission test study guides unprompted, and when you responded with revulsion or rage, they defensively said, “But I just wanted you to have something to fall back on.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“And for the soul if it is to know itself it is into a soul that it must look”
― Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons: Poems

“The Europeans fight to exterminate us and call it civilizing us.”
― Claude McKay, Amiable with Big Teeth

“A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious. But the sound I heard wasn’t the sound of a book.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“People talk but do nothing,” the Ginen people said. “Papa God doesn’t talk, but he does plenty.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

“The lack of color is to show off the dresses. It terrifies our patrons into an existential crisis and then, a purchase. This is what Gizzy tells me, anyway. “The black,” she says, “reminds us that we are mortal and that youth is fleeting. Also, nothing makes pink taffeta pop like a dark void.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“We built new houses on the new riverbanks and our abandoned riverbed became, seen from space (we saw pictures), a long, pale line by day, a deep, black slash at night. Ode to Asa Bundy Sheffey, which was Robert Hayden’s birth name, reduced from three trochees to two. It was a family issue, his unhappy mother giving him to unhappy neighbors, the Haydens, who raised him, and called him Robert Hayden, though they never bothered to make it legal. From time to time, he’d see his blood parents—in a blur, his eyes so bad he never knew what they looked like, nor even what he himself looked like, without his glasses, which were so thick sometimes sight got lost inside them. Might he have left, or found, some poems in those dense lenses? An austere militant of reticence: Robert Hayden Asa Bundy Sheffey. Permissionless, I’m adding three more tumbling trochees, making five in a row, to inject into your name even more velocity. They’re all I can give you, in gratitude for some truths you left, in deep-set ink, on the page.”
― Thomas Lux, To The Left Of Time: A Kingsley Tufts Award-Winning Poetry Collection—Satirical, Humorous, and Insightful

“We had shame, so much shame at being the few survivors. Other survivors, if they existed, must also feel this way. We were ashamed of leaving people behind, of taking our comforts where we could find them, of stealing from those who could not defend themselves. We had known ourselves to be cowards and hypocrites, pernicious liars really, and to find this suspicion confirmed was not a relief but a horror. If the End was Nature’s way of punishing us so that we might once again know our place, then yes, we knew it. If it was at all unclear before, it was not now.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Six different kinds of forest all around us. Seventeen hundred flowering plants. More tree species than in all of Europe. Thirty kinds of salamander, for God’s sake. Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head. Above us, a raven the size of an Oz winged monkey flew up into a white pine.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Before I continue with the scholarly account of tribalography, I want to tell you a Choctaw story. My tribe’s language has a mysterious prefix that, when combined with other words, represents a form of creation. It is nuk or nok, and it has to do with the power of speech, breath, and mind. Things with nok or nuk attached to them are so powerful they create. For instance, nukfokechi brings forth knowledge and inspiration. A teacher is a nukfoki, the beginning of action.”
― LeAnne Howe, Choctalking on Other Realities

“Centuries of being attached to the machine had atrophied the languages of the earth.”
― Ben Okri, The Freedom Artist

“Grandma I’ve been writing in names that are missing, the ones I know, which is by no means all of them. That’s what happens, you see. First, there’s no need to write who they are, because everyone knows that’s Great-Aunt Sophia or Cousin Rudi, and then only some of us know, and already we’re asking, ‘Who’s that with Gertrude?’ and ‘I don’t remember this man with the little dog’, and you don’t realise how fast they’re disappearing from being remembered … Wilma It’s still an amazing thing to me, to know the faces of the dead! I can remember Grandpa Jakobovicz’s tobacco-stained whiskers, but his wife died giving birth to Poppa before there were photographs, so now no one knows what she looked like any more than if she’d been some kind of rumour. Grandma Everyone was mad to have a photograph when I was a girl, it was like a miracle and you had to go to a photographer’s to pose for him … wedding couples, soldiers in their first uniforms, children in front of painted scenery … and, always, women dressed up for the carnival ball, posing with a Greek pillar. Later, when we had a camera, there were too many pictures to keep in the album, holiday pictures with real scenery, swimming pictures, pictures of children in dirndl pinafores and lederhosen, like little Austrians. Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.”
― Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt

“The poem "Fuck / Our Future" (p. 49):
When our scorching planet ignites the last evacuating airship to cook its soft cargo of human flesh in an expanding fireball and fragments of its propeller blades thunk inches deep into tree trunks in the straggling forest beneath / What I want to know is which will survive / which strain / which wood grain will hold encoded / like a fingerprint pushed into wet clay / that final day of reckoning when this cerulean blue ordained world we have corroded a toxic grey / begins its self-reclamation starting with that tree / a lone lieutenant / a desperate sentinel / erect / through the falling ball of fire / jet fuel and smouldering meat / its face of leaves weighed with dust / its waist of branches noosed in plastic bags / yet standing stubborn in its shaggy majesty / amidst the ship’s carnage / like a righteous middle finger thrust at all humanity / proud in the snarling sky”
― Inua Ellams, The Actual

“She pulled the shell of a cicada from a pine tree’s trunk, turned it over to show the neat slit down the belly where, having grown, it had wriggled out of its old self into something new. And she told him stories. Stories about warriors and princesses, poor brave girls and boys, monsters and magicians. The brother and sister who outwitted the witch and found their way home. The girl who saved her swan-brothers from enchantment. Ancient myths that made sense of the world: why sunflowers nod, why echoes linger, why spiders spin. Stories her mother had told her in childhood, before she stopped speaking of such things: how once there had been nine suns, baking the earth to dust, until a brave archer shot them one by one out of the sky. How the monkey king tricked his way into the heavenly garden to steal the peaches of immortality. How once a year, two lovers, forever separated, crossed a river of stars to meet in midair.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“And how much of a difference can it make really, just one story, even all these stories taken together and funneled into the ear of the busy world—a world moving so quickly that voices and sounds Doppler into a rising whine, so distracted that even when your attention snags on the burr of something unusual, you are dragged away before you can see it, uprooting it like a bee’s spent stinger. It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring, just these words, just this thing that happened once to one person that the listener does not and will never know. It is just a story. It is only words. She does not know”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“while we’re at it, please can Quaker Oats ban Ethan Frome from the curriculum altogether? It’s a snoozefest of repressed, milquetoast characters, all building up to the climax of—no joke—a toboggan ride. We should end on the Whartonian high of The Age of Innocence, which is probably the best novel set in New York City, ever. It’s about rich white people planning hits and takedowns at fancy balls like it’s The Godfather. Even though The Age of Innocence was written a hundred years ago, you just know that Edith Wharton knew what was up.”
― Patricia Park, Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim

“At some point early on I must have understood that all the great writers whom I so loved, all those white Europeans whose works I revered and hoped to emulate, I must have understood that they—either for reasons of my class, or gender, or mixed race, or for being a crass, shallow American—would have looked down on me. But I can’t remember this ever mattering to me. Now, in our brave new cultural world, I keep being told that it’s the only thing that should matter to me.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Which three authors, dead or alive, would you invite to a literary dinner party? is a question often asked of authors interviewed for The New York Times Book Review. What Edmund White said James Merrill said about a young fan: “Why does he want to meet us in the flesh? Doesn’t he realize the best part of us is on the page and all he’ll be meeting is an empty hive?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Monsters—the bad kind—show us the way forwards, as well as pushing us back.” That the old world is dying is widely acknowledged and addressed. The old ways of doing things no longer fit who we have become: the systems fail, break, decay, fall into corruption; anachronistic school curriculums and journalistic and political norms, social roles and customs, rules, laws, and institutions don’t offer us equipment to face the realities of our time, whether they feel like cages or outgrown garments or broken tools. Poverty and displacement, degradation and alienation are byproducts of voracious, ruthless systems committed to inequality and indifferent to human rights and the rights of nature, which is to say that they are violence by other means, and sometimes they are the violence itself.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change