Everyday People Quotes

“How many hands were shook and names were signed
and pipes were passed congenially in a circle,
before the first of the used-car dealerships rose up
on the ground where the gods had walked?”
― Albert Goldbarth, Everyday People: Poems

“you don’t understand

the protoknowledge we’re born with, coded into our cells:

soon soon soon enough we die. Even before we’ve seen

the breast, we’re crying to the world that we want;

and the world doles out its milkiness in doses. We

want, we want, we want, and if we don’t then

that’s what we want: abstemiousness is only

hunger translated into another language. Yes

there’s pain and and heartsore rue and suffering, but

there’s no such thing as “anti-pleasure”: it’s pleaure

that the anchorite takes in his bleak cave

and Thoreau in his bean rows and cabin. For Thoreau,

the Zen is: wanting less is wanting more.

Of less.”
― Albert Goldbarth, Everyday People: Poems

“If your life depended on coming up with a tally,

if you could straighten its numbers into a flexible line

around the moon and back a dozen times,

a hundred … still you couldn’t count the planets

that cohabit this planet.”
― Albert Goldbarth, Everyday People: Poems