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
A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out
the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
And when Humanity lands there, it looks out,
and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
Kurt Vonnegut, Cold Turkey, at online publication In These Time
Answer July —
Where is the Bee —
Where is the Blush —
Where is the Hay?
Ah, said July —
Where is the Seed —
Where is the Bud —
Where is the May —
Answer Thee — Me —
Nay — said the May —
Show me the Snow —
Show me the Bells —
Show me the Jay!
Quibbled the Jay —
Where be the Maize —
Where be the Haze —
Where be the Bur?
Here — said the Year —
Emily Dickinson
An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument.
Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin.
What if everybody jumped on his violin?
Marilyn Monroe, Life magazine 1962
The English winter — ending in July,
To recommence in August.
Lord Byron, from Don Juan
When you leave New York,
you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is.
Clean is not enough.
Fran Lebowitz, reported in Rand Lindsly's Quotations
To the ignorant and bawling fanatics who stun you with their pother about liberty, political or civil liberty seems to be the principal end for which government ought to exist. But the final cause or purpose for which government ought to exist, is the furtherance of the common weal to the greatest possible extent.
John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined
America is woven of many strands;
I would recognize them and let it so remain.
It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth
of our country or of any country.
Life is to be lived, not controlled;
and humanity is won by continuing to play
in face of certain defeat.
Our fate is to become one, and yet many—
This is not prophecy, but description.
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
The republic is a dream
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
Carl Sandburg, Washington Monument by Night, stanza 4
Gray prinked with rose,
White tipped with blue,
Shoes with gay hose,
Sleeves of chrome hue;
Fluffed frills of white,
Dark bordered light;
Such shimmerings through
Trees of emerald green are eyed
This afternoon, from the road outside.
They whirl around:
Many laughters run
With a cascade's sound;
Then a mere one.
A bell: they flee:
Silence then: —
So it will be
Some day again
With them, — with me.
Thomas Hardy
We spend our life, it's ours,
trying to bring together in the same instant
a ray of sunshine and a free bench...
Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing
That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it.
Your own village means that you're not alone,
that you know there's something of you
in the people and the plants and the soil,
that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.
Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfire