2025

 

"I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes - everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I am going to go out like a fucking meteor!
- Audre Lorde

"What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity."
 - William S. Burroughs

So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I'm lucky,
she'll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we'll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn't for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment, 
I'll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.
-"To Hold", by Li-Young Lee

"America is in ever greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals". 
 - The Diary of Anais Nin, 1939-1944

"They'll tell you that the arts and humanities aren't practical and then read poetry at funerals and weddings, cry over films and search for meaning in ancient philosophy. Surviving is one type of practicality, knowing why we bother is another."
 - Joel Uili, "On the importance of the arts & humanities", The Career Archetypes

"All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country's pride."
 - Bertrand Russell

"The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with those who free you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel. Today's life is too hard, too bitter, too anemic, for us to undergo new bondages, from whom we love... This is how I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure in one word, and I would like to be for you the companion we are sure of, always."
 - Albert Camus

"A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness."
 - Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness (1859)


"The only intelligent tactical response to life's horror is to laugh defiantly at it."
 - Soren Kierkegaard


"The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt - your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater the saving of your alienated being."
 - Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844


Then suddenly
you came
with your sun-heart,
your starry night sky-mind,
wings-hands
and you painted,
you wrote
all over my solitude.

The frozen land in me
became your rose garden.

- Anita Krizzan


"The Chrisitan fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man"
 - D.H. Lawrence

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quite or excite you. Books to help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."
 - Anne Lamott

"An Artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I've ever wanted to do is tell that."
 - James Baldwin


"When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality."
 - Andrei Tarkovsky


"Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion... It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness... Please Kid, do not forget yourself; save that, save that, preserve yourself; turn out those mean little old tales by the dozens, it is easy, it is grace...drive it home, sell truth, for it needs to be sold. Remember, Kid, what I say to you tonight; never forget it, read this over in your gloomier moments and never, never forget."
 - Jack Kerouac

"People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds... Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth."
 - Jonathan Haidt


"You write in order to change the world, knowing pefectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it."
 - James Baldwin


"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."
 - T.S. Eliot

"You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence."
 - Octavia E. Butler

"Half of life is lost in charming others, the other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others. Leave this play, you have played enough."
 - Rumi