Hidden bonus

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

        Margaret Drabble, The Middle Ground

 

 

 

 

 

Digging for common ground

There’s common ground in most conflict,
though it may take a little digging to unearth it beneath all the bullshit.

    Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

 

 

 

 

In order

First delight, then instruct.

    Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Gustav Friedrich Waagen
    On the Purpose of the Berlin Gallery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Convenient belief

It is convenient that there be gods,
and, as it is convenient,
let us believe that there are.

        Ovid, Ars Amatoria

 

 

 

Poem: Dislocation

I envy those who envy me for traveling.
Sometimes I sit on a foreign street in a busy cafe,
imagining you wishing you were here,
feeling for the first time the thrilling flush
of wanting to be elsewhere,
the frisson of happiness that wishes bring.
And so I sit quietly knowing that now
it’s time to figure out just what it is
I meant to do here.

        Simon Constam

 

 

 

 

Get your story straight

A story that supports the status quo
is generally considered to be neutral
and is not questioned in terms of its objectivity
while one that challenges the status quo
tends to be perceived as having a ‘point of view’ and therefore biased.

    Sharon Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism

 

 

 

Different things

What people say,
what people do,
and what they say they do
are entirely different things.

Margaret Mead, Teaching Music Through Performance In Band (attributed)

 

 

 

Keep it going

Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going,
    don't take anything too seriously,
        it'll all work out in the end.

             David Niven, The Other Side of the Moon

 

 

 

 

A test

Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished:
        If you're alive, it isn't.

    Richard Bach, Illusions:The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

 

 

 

 

Is that clear?

I try not to speak more clearly than I think.

        Niels Bohr, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

 

 

 

 

 

Who's speaking?

If God should really speak to man,
man could still never know that it was God speaking.

    Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties

 

 

 

Poem: The Poem Wants a Drink

In the workshop, students analyze
what each poem wants, what each one
strives to be. Well, this poem is
a layabout with limited ambitions. It wants
a drink.

This poem doesn't give a damn
for rhyme or reason. It only sings
off-key. It has no rhythm
in the jukebox of its soul.
It grew up without symbols.
It doesn't know from assonance.
Give it mambo lessons, and it
still won't learn to dance. It has
not one stanza with a lyric pedigree.
It's late, and getting later, and this poem
wants a drink.

Call it gray and tired. Even call it
a cliche. This poem's lived long enough
to know exactly what it means
to say: Don't be stingy
with the whiskey, baby.
.....Yes, the night
has been a cruel one, and this poem
could use a drink. 

             Karen Glenn  

Long life!

I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up,
foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust,
I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.

        Ovid, Metamorphoses 

 

 

 

 

 

Stop interrupting

Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.

        Napoleon Bonaparte, The Military Quotation Book

 

 

 

 

Taking our measure

The measure of a country’s greatness
is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.

        Thurgood Marshall, Furman vs. Georgia ruling 1972

 

 

 

 

Determining reality

The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.

        Ruth Nanda Anshen, Biography of an Idea

 

 

 

 

Rock on

Pop music tells you everything is okay,
while rock music tells you that it’s not okay,
but you can change it.

    Bono, 54th National Prayer Breakfast speech

 

 

 

 

More than the sum of the parts

It is too little to call Man a little world;
except God, man is a diminutive to nothing.
Man consists of more pieces, more parts,
than the world doth, nay, that the world is.

        John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Poet

She is working now, in a room
not unlike this one,
the one where I write, or you read.
Her table is covered with paper.
The light of the lamp would be
tempered by a shade, where the bulb's
single harshness might dissolve,
but it is not, she has taken it off.
Her poems? I will never know them,
though they are the ones I most need.
Even the alphabet she writes in
I cannot decipher. Her chair --
Let us imagine whether it is leather
or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her
have a chair, her shadeless lamp,
the table. Let one or two she loves
be in the next room. Let the door
be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

         Jane Hirshfield

 

 

 

 

 

Results or Process

And I knew that who I was
was not entirely dependent on my results.
I am who I am because of who I am,
not because of the commodities I generate
or even the, you know, sacred objects that I generate.
I am not my results.
I am my process.

        Sara Gran, The Infinite Blacktop

 

 

 

Poem: May Day

A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere. 

Red small leaves of the maple
Are clenched like a hand,
Like girls at their first communion
The pear trees stand. 

Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch; 

For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?

Sara Teasdale 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let it shine

What is to give light must endure burning.

        Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

 

 

 

 

The age of anxiety

You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control.
    But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.

            Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

 

 

 

 

 

Finders keepers

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive,
        but in finding something to live for.

                Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

 

 

 

What was He thinking?

I want to know how God created this world.
I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon,
in the spectrum of this or that element.
I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.

        Albert Einstein, "A Talk with Einstein," The Listener 54 (1955)

Poem: so you want to be a writer?

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

            Charles Bukowski