Dani Barnhart > Dani's Quotes

“I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing...”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”
― Rumi

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
― Gertrude Stein

“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place
between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...

It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”
― Gertrude Stein

“If a thing loves, it is infinite.”
― William Blake

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“Trapped

don't undress my love
you might find a mannequin:
don't undress the mannequin
you might find
my love.
she's long ago
forgotten me.
she's trying on a new
hat
and looks more the
coquette
than ever.

she is a
child
and a mannequin
and death.
I can't hate
that.
she didn't do
anything
unusual.
I only wanted her
to.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Walking Words

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“a woman with young children is not a woman but a mammal, salve, croon, water carrier”
― Rachel Zucker

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“No matter how you feel you have to act
like you are very popular with yourself;
very relaxed and purposeful
very unconfused
and not
like you are walking through the sunshine
singing
in chains.”
― Tony Hoagland

“So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.”
― Tony Hoagland

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein

“I believe that no great lyric poet ever speaks in the so-called “proper” language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in “proper” English grammar but in slant music of fragmentary perception. Half a world and half a century away, Cesar Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed to leap from one image to another, to make—to use Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the inarticulate. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.”
― Ilya Kaminsky

“If a girl is traveling in the steppe and she sees nothing but a single moving dot in the great distance, the dot sees her. Stag, man, wolf.”
― Atticus Lish

“Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art

“Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them).  Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.”
― Federico García-Lorca