Joe > Joe's Quotes

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
― Edith Wharton

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”
― Ezra Pound

“Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.”
― Ezra Pound

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”
― T.S. Eliot

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”
― T.S. Eliot

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”
― T.S. Eliot

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“. . . at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”
― Dennis Potter, Seeing the Blossom: Two Interviews and a Lecture