Mark Folse > Mark's Quotes

“I have weathered the storm, I have beaten out my exile.”
― Ezra Pound, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound

“Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“A poem should improve on the blank page.”
― Nicanor Parra

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities—”
― Ezra Pound, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound

“Old yam digger     please explain            this mountain’s sorrows”
― Matsuo Bashō, Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Basho

“Even in Kyoto     longing for Kyoto            hototogisu”
― Matsuo Bashō, Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Basho

“Moon woke me up
nine times
—still just 4 a.m.”
― Matsuo Bashō, Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Basho

“—————— I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else? That’s what I’d like to call disorganization, and I’d have the confidence to venture on, because I would know where to return afterward: to the previous organization. I’d rather call it disorganization because I don’t want to confirm myself in what I lived — in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don’t have the fortitude for another.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“But I’m afraid to begin composing in order to be understood by the imaginary someone, I’m afraid to start to “make” a meaning, with the same tame madness that till yesterday was my healthy way of fitting into a system. Will I need the courage to use an unprotected heart and keep talking to the nothing and the no one? as a child thinks about the nothing. And run the risk of being crushed by chance.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“no leaders, please invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don’t swim in the same slough. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate yourself and accept what is but only on the terms that you have invented and reinvented. be self-taught. and reinvent your life because you must; it is your life and its history and the present belong only to you.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned

“Ah, hand holding mine, if I hadn’t needed so much of myself to shape my life, I would already have had life!”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“—I am the chief steward of my fate, I am the fireman of my soul.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place: Stories

“word”
― Malcolm Lowry, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place: Stories

“greater men than I have failed to agree with Life.”
― Charles Bukowski, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck: Contemporary American Poetry—Bukowski's Poignant View on Life and Lechery

“SCARED TO DEATH In Arizona, a 1000-acre forest of junipers suddenly withered and died. Foresters are unable to explain it, but the Indians say the trees died of fear but they are not in agreement as to what caused the fright.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place: Stories

“In the Volksgarten “I’d like to have a blue balloon! A blue balloon is what I’d like!” “Here’s a blue balloon for you, Rosamunde!” It was explained to her then that there was a gas inside that was lighter than the air in the atmosphere, as a consequence of which, etc. etc. “I’d like to let it go—,” she said, just like that. “Wouldn’t you rather give it to that poor little girl over there?” “No, I want to let it go—!” She lets the balloon go, keeps looking after it, till it disappears in the blue sky. “Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t give it to the poor little girl?” “Yes, I should’ve given it to the poor little girl.” “Here’s another blue balloon, give her this one!” “No, I want to let this one go too up into the blue sky!”— She does so. She is given a third blue balloon. She goes over to the poor little girl on her own, gives this one to her, saying: “You let it go!” “No,” says the poor little girl, peering enraptured at the balloon. In her room it flew up to the ceiling, stayed there for three days, got darker, shriveled up and fell down dead, a little black sack. Then the poor little girl thought to herself: “I should have let it go outside in the park, up into the blue sky, I’d’ve kept on looking after it, kept on looking—!” In the meantime, the rich little girl gets another ten balloons, and one time Uncle Karl even buys her all thirty balloons in one batch. Twenty of them she lets fly up into the sky and gives ten to poor children. From then on she had absolutely no more interest in balloons. “The stupid balloons—,” she said. Whereupon Aunt Ida observed that she was rather advanced for her age! The poor little girl dreamed: “I should have let it go up into the blue sky, I’d’ve kept on looking and looking—!”
― Peter Altenberg, Telegrams of the Soul

“The young woman thought: “You’ve got to be old or mad. But we stayed too young. Is it any fault of ours? We still soak up the juices like a sapling. We rob nature just to exist. Oh and by the way, the earth still has a molten middle, and its chimneys sometimes spew forth and bury places blossoming with life. Isn’t that so? Bane of my existence, fire of my soul, Edgar, my beloved, you keep me young, don’t let me grow old!”
― Peter Altenberg, Telegrams of the Soul

“Pleasure is not diversion but urgent life, a social order perceived as temporary.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“What about the Americans?” “Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“I see my son in the small tumult of the moment. He knows he has to handle this alone and does it conscientiously enough, shaking the man’s hand, nodding madly. He is not experienced at hearty rapport, of course, but his effort is meticulous and touching. He knows the man’s pleasure is important. He has seen this everywhere on the island and he has listened to his mother. We must be more precise in the details of our responses. This is how we let people know we understand the seriousness and dignity of their feelings. Life is different here. We must be equal to the largeness of things.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you’re doing here,”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“That’s when I proffered my words of wisdom, that waste is the highest virtue one can achieve in advanced capitalist society. The fact that Japan bought Phantom jets from America and wasted vast quantities of fuel on scrambles put an extra spin in the global economy, and that extra spin lifted capitalism to yet greater heights. If you put an end to all the waste, mass panic would ensue and the global economy would go haywire. Waste is the fuel of contradiction, and contradiction activates the economy, and an active economy creates more waste.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“I checked into the quiet little room on the fifth floor of the good old Stadthotel with two pairs of socks and two large bottles of slivovitz for unseen eventualities.”
― Peter Altenberg, Telegrams of the Soul

“The spirit of polytheism, its affirmation of the sublimely disturbing polyvalence of life and its courageousness in the face of that polyvalence, has the power to shock us out of our satanic torpor and provide us with truly viable alternatives to the things to which so many of us so desperately seek alternatives. I”
― Dan McCoy, The Love of Destiny: the Sacred and the Profane in Germanic Polytheism

“As Charles Olson said, "Form is never more than an extension of content," and a work that attempts to dismantle the objective-subjective dichotomy must, if it is to be effective, demonstrate a way of writing that blurs the line between "objective" or scholarly writing and "subjective" or creative writing.”
― Dan McCoy, The Love of Destiny: the Sacred and the Profane in Germanic Polytheism

“Where monotheism is a moral worldview, polytheism is a sacral one. The sacred is not remote from the world; it is the very essence of the world.”
― Dan McCoy, The Love of Destiny: the Sacred and the Profane in Germanic Polytheism

“When in the seventh century King Redwald of East Anglia provided one altar in his church to sacrifice to Christ, and another small one to offer victims to devils,1 he was not behaving childishly, or cunningly hoping to get the best of both worlds, but merely acting according to normal heathen custom, since acceptance of one god did not mean that one wholly rejected one’s neighbour’s deity. This indeed must have been one of the most difficult lessons for the new converts to Christianity to learn, and while they gained in single-mindedness, it is to be feared that they lost much of their old spirit of tolerance. The”
― Hilda Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

“Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

“The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water—all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here