trina > trina's Quotes

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices First Series

“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:



We got dressed and showed the house

You live well the visitor said

The slum must be inside you.



If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”
― John Donne

“I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”
― Edward Gorey

“since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid”
― E.E. Cummings, E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

“Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen."

And who gains by it, in the end?"

It's too soon to say. We have to see who can best exploit the falsifications, their own and those of the others: whether it's the police or our organization."

The taxi driver is pricking up his ears. You motion Corinna to restrain herself from making unwise remarks.

But she says, "Don't be afraid. This is a fake taxi. What really alarms me, though, is that there is another taxi following us."

Fake or real?"

Fake, certainly, but I don't know whether it belongs to the police or to us.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words people who are too self important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandosity.”
― Tom Robbins

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Denis Diderot

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
― Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays

“Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean-
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.”
― Langston Hughes

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Annajanska the Bolshevik Empress

“The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet--”
― Issa Kobayashi, The Dumpling Field: Haiku of Issa

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."

(Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)”
― Voltaire

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“He would wonder at their fates. Such a strange path to chart. The heart pulls, the mind resists. The heart wins. It wins. Nobody can chart the shape of his or her life before that shape emerges. There is hardly any rhyme to that shape and almost no reason. And that is the grandest, the most irreducible mystery of all.”
― Nick Cutter, Little Heaven

“You know what my sister said to me once? She said that maybe the best thing about having a child, especially a young one, was that you could love that child shamelessly. She said that you could put everything into that kid, love crazily, give everything in your heart and mind and soul over to that other person. You can’t do that for a husband or a wife, not really. The only other entity you could love that way would be God, if you’re a believer.”
― Nick Cutter, Little Heaven