Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period
at the end of a statement we've long taken for granted,
suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve
of a tall black hat on its head,
and realizing it was a question mark all along.
David James Duncan, My Story as told by Water
Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality,
for one can temporarily evade reality
by avoiding the distasteful situation;
but anxiety is a source of education always present
because one carries it within.
Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying,
since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
A shaman, according to Claude Levi-Stauss, is a person who has a concrete relationship with language, because he uses it for healing, as a tool and as medicine. To the shaman, words aren’t just words, but a scalpel for slicing and reorganizing what’s in this world, for cutting and binding; a phenomenon with power over all other phenomena – something truly sacred. In his Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss says that scientists’ problem with shamans is that they really do heal people.
Alvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender
When you say
ping me
I want to punch you.
It’s true.
Bio break, too.
It makes me cringe.
And if I am being honest
I don’t care about your ducks or the row they’re in.
I don’t know what net-net means unless it’s being said by an excited tennis announcer.
Come to think of it
let’s not circle back
or drill down
or take a deep dive
or take it offline
or level the playing field
or create action items
and honestly I don’t care
if this won’t scale
and may I add that
going forward I would like to park this project.
And this job.
I quit.
Now.
Sorry.
I have a hard stop.
John Kenney, Love Poems for Anxious People
Age has no reality except in the physical world.
The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time.
Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits
remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom.
Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything,
but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
You have to get your priorities right.
Women are around all the time
but World Cups come only once every four years.
Peter Osgood, English footballer
quoted in A Commonplace Book: British Heritage Travel