Read These Quotations

David Milch

2008-01-06T13:33:00.000-08:00

I've never been on any road that I didn't find interesting.

Raymond Carver

2007-12-24T01:03:00.001-08:00

I made a wasteland of everything I touched.

Peter Everwine

2007-12-04T19:05:00.000-08:00

Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its changes.

Albert Camus

2007-10-28T23:03:00.000-07:00

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Stanley Kunitz

2007-09-30T20:10:00.001-07:00

What other morality has the artist but to endure? The only ones who survive, I think, beyond the equally destructive temptations of self-praise and self-pity, are those whose discontent is with themselves. The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.

Cormac McCarthy

2007-09-10T21:05:00.002-07:00

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.

Graham Greene

2007-09-10T21:05:00.001-07:00

One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Edmund Burke

2007-09-10T21:04:00.001-07:00

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.

Sophocles

2007-09-10T21:03:00.001-07:00

It is the dead
Not the living who make the longest demands
We die forever

Kurt Vonnegut

2007-09-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Paul Valéry

2007-09-10T21:00:00.002-07:00

Sometimes something wants to be said, sometimes a way of saying wants to be used.

Clive James

2007-09-10T21:00:00.001-07:00

A man looking for oblivion should be allowed to have it.

Jim Harrison

2007-09-10T20:59:00.002-07:00

What cannot be said will get wept.

Thomas Hardy

2007-09-10T20:59:00.001-07:00

Life may be sad past saying...

Sonny Sharrock

2007-09-10T20:58:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song. I know it's possible.

Dante Alighieri

2007-09-10T20:57:00.000-07:00

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

John Blair, "Cicada"

2007-09-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

Yes, the first knowledge that counts is that everything stops.

Philip Larkin

2007-09-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never

W.H. Auden

2007-09-10T20:54:00.001-07:00

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Jorge Luis Borges

2007-09-10T20:53:00.000-07:00

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.

Henri Poincaré

2007-09-10T20:52:00.000-07:00

Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.

John Stuart Mill

2007-09-10T20:51:00.002-07:00

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

William Shakespeare

2007-09-10T20:51:00.001-07:00

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?

Mario Savio

2007-09-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.

Elvin Jones

2007-09-10T20:48:00.002-07:00

You gotta be willin’ to die with the motherfucker.

Philip Roth

2007-09-10T20:48:00.001-07:00

It was the interest in life and the attempt to get life down on the page that made me a writer—and then I discovered that, in many ways, I am standing on the outside of life.

Unknown Author

2007-09-10T20:47:00.001-07:00

Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.

E.L. Doctorow

2007-09-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

The book is written in silence and read in silence, and goes from heart to heart and soul to soul like nothing else can.

Ron Slate

2007-09-10T20:36:00.002-07:00

          ...we lived
in this world, but what were we like?

Tom Stoppard

2007-09-10T20:36:00.001-07:00

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

Arthur Rimbaud

2007-09-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

What will become of the world when you leave? No matter what happens, no trace of you now will remain.

Albert Camus

2007-09-10T20:34:00.002-07:00

There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.

Larry Levis

2007-09-10T20:34:00.001-07:00

Time swarms around me with its presences.

Robert Hass

2007-09-10T20:33:00.000-07:00

I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness

Sonya Chung

2007-09-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

It's all sort of wrong, we make art as a way of managing all that wrong, as a way of surviving it and keeping on towards beauty.

Larry Levis

2007-09-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

I may not believe in the myth of the Fall, but it is still possible for me to feel fallen.

Harold Arlen

2007-09-10T20:30:00.002-07:00

Music doesn't argue, discuss, or quarrel. It just breathes the air of freedom.

Rilke

2007-09-10T20:30:00.001-07:00

Works of art are of an intimate loneliness. Only love can grip and fairly judge them. Consider yourself and your feeling right every time.

Philip Larkin

2007-09-10T20:29:00.002-07:00

...we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Marcus Aurelius

2007-09-10T20:29:00.001-07:00

Nothing is more beautiful than a word fitly spoken.

Ravi Coltrane

2007-09-10T20:28:00.001-07:00

I always thought, If the plane starts going down, I'm going to put this on, because it's really the last thing I want to hear.

Hou Hsiao-hsien

2007-09-06T21:47:00.002-07:00

What makes times "best" is that they're lost and gone: we'll never have them again.

Clifford Odets

2007-09-06T21:47:00.001-07:00

[T]here is only shame and regret, resignation and anxiety.

C.G. Hanzlicek

2007-09-06T21:42:00.000-07:00

...in the end, beyond the metaphors
We can't help loving life.

Robert Hass

2007-09-06T21:41:00.002-07:00

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles the old thinking.

Edward Hirsch

2007-09-06T21:41:00.001-07:00

Poetry is language in action against time, against death.

William Ramsay, Scottish Chemist

2007-09-06T21:39:00.000-07:00

The noblest exercise of the mind within doors, and most befitting a person of quality, is study.

Sebastião Salgado

2007-09-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

History is above all a succession of challenges, of repetitions, of preseverances. It's an endless cycle of oppressions, humiliations, and disasters, but also a testament to man's ability to survive.

Emiliano Zapata

2007-09-05T19:48:00.001-07:00

I'd rather die on my feet than live my life on my knees.

Thomas Wolfe

2007-09-05T19:47:00.002-07:00

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

2007-09-05T19:47:00.001-07:00

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Leo Tolstoy

2007-09-05T19:46:00.002-07:00

The equality of the capitalist and the laborer is the same as the equality of two fighters, when the hands of one are bound, while a gun is put into the hands of the other, and equal conditions are strictly observed for both in the fight.

George Steiner

2007-09-05T19:46:00.001-07:00

It is not the literal past that rules us, but images of the past.

William Shakespeare

2007-09-05T19:45:00.002-07:00

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

Jaroslav Seifert

2007-09-05T19:45:00.001-07:00

If an ordinary person is silent about the truth it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent he is lying.

George Saunders

2007-09-05T19:44:00.000-07:00

There comes a phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

Jean-Paul Sartre

2007-09-05T19:43:00.000-07:00

We are no longer with those who want to possess the world, but with those who want to change it, and it is to the very plan of changing it that it reveals the secrets of its being...

Jean-Paul Sartre

2007-09-05T19:42:00.004-07:00

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them...there is nothing.

Saint John of The Cross

2007-09-05T19:42:00.003-07:00

At the evening of our life, we will be judged on love.

Ned Rorem

2007-09-05T19:42:00.001-07:00

The frustration of being nonexistent keeps us awake.

Joseph Roach

2007-09-05T19:41:00.003-07:00

...memory operates as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past.

Rainer Maria Rilke

2007-09-05T19:41:00.001-07:00

You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke

2007-09-04T22:25:00.000-07:00

Beauty is only
the first touch of terror
we can still bear...

Mordecai Richler

2007-09-04T22:24:00.002-07:00

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing, it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Spencer Reece

2007-09-04T22:24:00.001-07:00

The ponies said: This day astounds us. The field is green.

Marcel Proust

2007-09-04T22:23:00.004-07:00

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

Sergio Pininfarina

2007-09-04T22:23:00.003-07:00

Efficiency is also beauty.

Octavio Paz

2007-09-04T22:23:00.001-07:00

...duro poco
y es enorme la noche.

Ovid

2007-09-04T22:22:00.003-07:00

The lost hour never returns.

Beth Orton

2007-09-04T22:22:00.001-07:00

Everything is sacred, and nothing is as sacred as we want it to be.

Gregory Orr

2007-09-04T22:21:00.004-07:00

When Keats says that this world is not a vale of tears, as
religion misconceives it to be, but a vale of soul-making, I
believe him. I believe that an act of imagination is one of the
ways we make our souls, but it's a way surrounded by darkness
and fear.

Mary Oliver

2007-09-04T22:21:00.003-07:00

...poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

Nietzsche

2007-09-04T22:21:00.001-07:00

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Vladimir Nabokov

2007-09-04T22:20:00.002-07:00

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

W.S. Merwin

2007-09-04T22:20:00.001-07:00

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color

W.S. Merwin

2007-09-04T22:19:00.004-07:00

What you do not have you find everywhere.

William Maxwell

2007-09-04T22:19:00.003-07:00

In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take.

Philip Larkin

2007-09-04T22:19:00.001-07:00

What will survive of us is love.

Stanley Kunitz

2007-09-04T22:18:00.003-07:00

What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

Milan Kundera

2007-09-04T22:18:00.001-07:00

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

2007-09-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

2007-09-03T23:01:00.003-07:00

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Jane Kenyon

2007-09-03T23:01:00.001-07:00

There are things in this life that we must endure which are all but unendurable, and yet I find that there is a great goodness. Why, when there could have been nothing, is there something? This is a great mystery. How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is love, kindness, beauty?

Kafka

2007-09-03T23:00:00.002-07:00

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Pauline Kael

2007-09-03T23:00:00.001-07:00

If art isn't pleasure, what is it—work?

John 9:4

2007-09-03T22:59:00.002-07:00

We must work...while it is day: night comes, when no one can work

Henry James

2007-09-03T22:59:00.001-07:00

We work in the dark.

John Irving

2007-09-03T22:57:00.000-07:00

Dr. Larch had pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign—wherever Melony went , she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she'll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.

Zbigniew Herbert

2007-09-03T22:56:00.000-07:00

We are despite everything
The guardians of our brothers

C.G. Hanzlicek

2007-08-30T21:59:00.001-07:00

If you want to say this life
Is merely the bridge
To the life we're asked to dream of,
You are my enemy.

C.G. Hanzlicek

2007-08-30T21:58:00.002-07:00

…death will hold up a mirror
we are meant to measure our lives in.

Corrinne Clegg Hales

2007-08-30T21:58:00.001-07:00

If you work fast, and have a strong stomach,
there's a chance
to do good in the world.

Goya

2007-08-30T21:56:00.001-07:00

I've no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell, I lack everything—all I've got left is will.

Gide

2007-08-30T21:55:00.001-07:00

I love life passionately, but I don't trust it.

Paul Fussell

2007-08-30T21:54:00.002-07:00

It takes some honesty, even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning.

T.S. Eliot

2007-08-30T21:54:00.001-07:00

You are the music while the music lasts.

James Dickey

2007-08-30T21:53:00.002-07:00

The poet is not trying to tell the truth; he's trying to make it, and he tries to make a different version of it from the official version that God made or the world made.

Degas

2007-08-30T21:53:00.001-07:00

We see what we want to see, and from this falsification comes art.

Colette

2007-08-30T21:52:00.004-07:00

Who says you should be happy? Do your work.

Sonya Chung

2007-08-30T21:52:00.003-07:00

I want this to be the year of finishing things.