Making a fist

"How do you know if you are going to die?"

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

November Night

Listen. . .

With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

- Adelaide Crapsey

Sick Heavens

After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains
  For a long dreary season, comes a day
  Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
- John Keats

I cannot be unhappy

"As long as this exists," I thought, "and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy."

- Ann Frank

Ignorance

... nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

― Isaac Asimov

Holding the universe together

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

- J.D. Salinger

Interpretation

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

- Susan Sontag

Swimming Home

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely.

- Deborah Levy

Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose And Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

- Howard Nemerov

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

- Robert Frost


















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Happy ending

Every story has got a happy end - you just have to know when you stop telling.

- Neil Gaiman, Preludes and Nocturnes

He Loves You

Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

― George Carlin

Expect Nothing

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

- Alice Walker

Dirge without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Turbulence

Higher you climb, trouble in mind
lungs labour, heights hurl vistas
Oxygen hangs ready
overhead. In the event put on
the child's mask first. Breathe normally

- Adrienne Rich

Faith

“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!

- Emily Dickinson

Telling Time

My son and I walk away
from his sister’s day-old grave.
Our backs to the sun,
the forward pitch of our shadows
tells us the time.
By sweetest accident
he inclines
his shadow,
touching mine.

- Jo McDougall

A thing of beauty

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness;

- John Keats

For Jane

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

- Charles Bukowski

Persecuted

Man some people really, really, really want to be a persecuted minority but without all that being persecuted or being a minority stuff.

- The Whelk at 11:34 AM on August 2

It takes so many years

It takes so many years
To learn that one is dead
So you must help me. I will go.

- T.S. Eliot

My Garden

in the sun and in the rain
and in the day and in the night

pain is a flower
pain is flowers

blooming all the time.


- Charles Bukowski

The Flower

Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.

Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.

- Robert Creeley

Star

Star light, star bright,
The first star I see tonight;
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.

To Love

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

― Arundhati Roy

I'm the one

I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.

― Jimi Hendrix

Autoimmune

She denies but how can she deny
                    the
                          rule
                    to
                          which
                    she
                          is
                    an
                          exception      is she
autoimmune     no she is not.

- Anne Carson, Antigonik

Exhalation

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

- Ted Chiang

Why the Classics

2
generals of the most recent wars
if a similar affair happens to them
whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence

they accuse their subordinates
envious colleagues
unfavourable winds

Thucydides says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly

- Zbigniew Herbert

Humidifier

                                               what

Would life be if we could not buy

Objects to care for us

And bear them home, away from the druggists' pity,

If we could not carry in our own arms

Alms, alchemy, to the safety of our bedrooms,

If there were no more

Sounds in the night, continuous

Hush, hush of warm steam, not

Like human breath though regular, if there were nothing in the world

More hopeful than the self,

Soothing it, wishing it well.

- Louise Gluck

Forever Young

It is cold to be forever young,
To come to tragic shores and flow,
In sapphire, round the sun-bleached stones,
Being, for old men, time of their time.

- Wallace Stevens

A Life

The day will come
when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse
and all goes still—
when nothing remains but the dayfly
folded in a leaf.
But no one knows it.

- Edith Södergran

A deal with God

It doesn't hurt me.
You wanna feel how it feels?
You wanna know, know that it doesn't hurt me?
You wanna hear about the deal I'm making?
You be running up that hill
You and me be running up that hill

And if I only could,
Make a deal with God,
And get him to swap our places,
Be running up that road,
Be running up that hill

- Kate Bush

In nomine

In the name of the Bee —

And of the Butterfly —

And of the Breeze — Amen!

- Emily Dickinson

Giving

It seemed to Michal that anyone who loves is constantly giving. So he was always giving her little surprises, seeking out shiny stones for her in the river, carving limitless pipes out of willow, blowing eggs, folding birds out of paper...

- Primeval and Other Times, Olga Tokarczuk

In the Land of Pain

Pain has a life of its own. The ingenious efforts a disease makes in order to survive.

- Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain

We will remember

"Our worst fear was that his face would fade,"
Telespiax's father said.
"But it did not. We will remember it until we die."

- Christopher Logue

No one

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of another.

- Charles Dickens

One of the few good things

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Common sense and a sense of humor

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

- William James

Be near me

Be near me when my light is low,
       When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
       And tingle; and the heart is sick, 

And all the wheels of Being slow.

- Thomas Hardy

Fragile things

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

- Neil Gaiman

She folds her memories like a parachute

Belfast Tune

Here's a girl from a dangerous town
She crops her dark hair short
So that less of her has to frown
When someone gets hurt.

She folds her memories like a parachute.
Dropped, she collects the peat
And cooks her veggies at home: they shoot
Here where they eat.

Ah, there's more sky in these parts than, say,
Ground. Hence her voice's pitch,
And her stare stains your retina like a gray
Bulb when you switch

Hemispheres, and her knee-length quilt
Skirt's cut to catch the squall,
I dream of her either loved or killed
Because the town's too small.

- Joseph Brodsky

I cry a lot

I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.

- Maurice Sendak

Any idiot

Any idiot can face a crisis — it's day to day living that wears you out.

- Checkhov

Most of the writers I know

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.

- David Foster Wallace

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

- Robert Frost

Winter is good

Winter is good - his Hoar Delights
Italic flavor yield -
To Intellects inebriate
With Summer, or the World -

Generic as a Quarry
And hearty - as a Rose -
Invited with asperity
But welcome when he goes.

- Emily Dickinson

What a circus

We're all going to die. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. we are terrorized and flattened by trvialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

- Charles Bukowski

I Am the People

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

-  Carl Sandburg