Keely

“A poem-shaped space, I thought. A poem-shaped space. I tried to hold a poem-shaped space in my mind. Sometimes the work of life is like preparing a bedroom for a guest: sweeping the floor, emptying the ash-tray, watering the sloping aloe plant. Opening the window wide to let new air in. I did all this inside my head, behind my eyes, while my fingers made words appear and waited for that guest to arrive.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“Some of what makes us human is our smallness. The brevity of our lifespans, the shortness of our memories, the narrowness of each person's field of vision. My Marian-ness is in the slender sample of the world that I am able to bring to my work. If we did not have this smallness, these limits, there would be no way to tell Ffarmer from Sappho, or Eliot, or anybody. So what was I to make of Charlotte--not small but all-devouring, ubiquitous, remembering? Anointed, in a way, by her magnitude. And at the same time, I am certain, diminished by it.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“I was demolishing a lettuce leaf, my oval raspy-toothed mouth opening and closing like a flesh valve as I oozed along on my own self-generated glistening slime highway. The lovely green blur all around me, the lacework I was creating, the scent of chlorophyll, the juiciness—it was pure bliss. Live in the moment, humans are often told, but snails don’t need to be told. We’re in the moment all the time, and the moment is in us.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“I don't worry about writers disappearing," she said, "not really. You can still knit a sweater, or buy a hand-knit sweater, even if most of them are made by machines. But what does it do to people if everything they read is just the upchuck of a very smart computer program?”
― Sean Michaels