"People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.”
– Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, PBS Television Series with Bill Moyers
Literary Quotations that Illuminate Life
"Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond."
[often quoted from Ramakrishna by Joseph Campbell]
"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
– Elizabeth Drew
“It is difficult to get the news from poems; yet men die miserably each day for lack of what is found there.” – William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
"A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone;
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept."
From "The Shield of Achilles" W.H. Auden
"Life remains a blessing although we cannot bless . . ."
"We must love our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart."
From "As I Walked Out One Evening" W.H. Auden
[What}”necessary poetry always does… is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed.” – Seamus Heaney, “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech”
“…we’d failed them by our disregard.” – Seamus Heaney, “Mint”
“We want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm.” – Seamus Heaney, “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech”
"Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even." – Dan Berrigan
“In a time of self-inflected blindness, she taught us how to see.” – Dan Berrigan, regarding Dorothy Day
“For those who hunger, give them bread. For those who have bread, give them a hunger for justice.” – Dorothy Day
“We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond…for we will not fight to save what we do not love.” – Stephen J. Gould, Eight Little Piggies
"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd." – Flannery O’Connor
“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” – Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
“See better, Lear.” – Kent in Shakespeare’s King Lear
"There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood lead on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of your life
Is spent in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures." from Julius Caesar
“Nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things…” – Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”
"My heart in hiding stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!"
from "The Windhover: to Christ our Lord" Gerard Manley Hopkins
"Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou has bound veins and bones in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: And dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee."
from "The Wreck of the Deutschland" Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Much Madness is divinest Sense to the discerning Eye.” – Emily Dickinson, “Much Madness is Divinest Sense, 620”
“They will dance to the iamb of the fans, whispering illicit rhymes.” – Barbara Kingsolver, commemorating the removal of poetry as a requirement in Arizona's schools, August 1997
“I need a way of seeing in the dark.” – Dysart, the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer’s play, Equus
“Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. It is the result of what man does with his higher incomprehension. The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental clichés. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.”
From Abraham Heschel’s God in Search of Man
“What now seems opaque, you will make transparent with your blazing heart.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“It will start women thinking, and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken.” – Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.” – Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginning
"The frame through which I viewed the world changed . . . with time. Greater than scene, I came to see,
is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being who will never be confined to any frame." Eudora Welty
“But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?” – Albert Camus
“The good man, the one who infects hardly anyone, is the man who suffers the fewest lapses of attention.” – Albert Camus, The Plague
"At Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thinking, people have to love one another without knowing much about it." from The Plague, Albert Camus
"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth – certainly the machine will wear out... but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine." – Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau,
"Wherever there's a lull in truth an institution springs up." from "Life Without Principle" Henry David Thoreau
"Action from principle changes things and relations." Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. Walden Henry David Thoreau
"Only that day dawns to which we are awake" from Walden Henry David Thoreau
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate… Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
“Ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
"But love is the only engine for survival." – Leonard Cohen, "The Future"
“Literature can no more explain suffering than can science or religion, but it can describe it better than either.” – James Wood
“How slender are the bodies of the young black oaks! With one stroke of the brush you could make them beautiful, on paper, but they would never be what they are.” – Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude
"The author, in his work, must be like God in the universe, present everywhere but visible nowhere."
Gustav Flaubert
Treat the earth well; it was not given to you by your parents, it was lent to you by your grandchildren. Kenyan Proverb
“He that putteth his pleasure in praise of the people hath but a fond fantasy. For, if his finger do but hurt of a hot blister, the mouths of a great many men blowing out his praises will scarcely, among them all, do him half so much ease as to have one little boy blow upon his finger.” – Thomas More
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” – John Milton, Areopagitica
“Poetry is a momentary stay against confusion.” – Robert Frost, preface to his Complete Poems
"Earth's the right place for love/ I don't know where it's likely to go better." from "Birches" by Robert Frost
“May we look upon the furniture of our houses and our garments, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions.” – John Woolman, “A Plea for the Poor”
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, from a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953
“Education worthy of the name is essentially education of character. For the genuine educator does not merely consider individual functions of his pupil, as one intending to teach him only to know or be capable of certain definite things; but his concern is always the person as a whole, both in the actuality in which he lives before you now and in his possibilities, what he can become.” – Martin Buber, Between Man and Man
“… I have been able to state categorically, namely, that the things that are true in any religious experience are to be found in that religious experience precisely because they are true; they are not true simply because they are found in that religious experience.” – Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman
“Nations are like bees; they cannot kill except at the cost of their own lives.” – George Bernard Shaw
"I don't want to end up simply having visited the world" from "When Death Comes" Mary Oliver
"At night
under the trees
the black snake
jellies forward
rubbing
roughly
the stems of the bloodroot,
the yellow leaves,
little boulders of bark,
to take off
the old life" from "Rain" part seven, Mary Oliver
"I don't know
what death's ultimate
purpose is, but I think
this: whoever dreams of holding his
life in his fist
year after year into the hundreds of years
has never considered the owl--
how he comes, exhausted 'through the snow,
through the icy trees,
past snags and vines . . .
through the mesh of every obstacle . . .
filling himself time and time again
with a red and digestible joy
sickled up from the lonely, white fields . . ." from "Lonely, White Fields" Mary Oliver
"The world is the host; it must be chewed." From protagonist Alfred Schweigen in John Updike's "The Music School"
"Read critically. Write consciously. Speak clearly. Tell your truth. Silence is the residue of fear." Clint Smith
"A passionate love of life must be quickened if we are to find the energy to stop the accelerating tumble (like a falling man rolling over and over down a mountain) towards annihilation. To sing awe -- to breathe out praise and celebration -- is as fundamental an impulse as to lament." from "Poetry, Prophecy, Survival" Denise Levertov
"Well, I would like to make,
thinking some line still taut between
me and them,
poems direct as what the birds said,
hard as a floor, sound as a bench,
mysterious as the silence when the tailor
would pause with his needle in the air." from "Illustrious Ancestors" Denise Levertov
"My brother used to bless the birds, and it is right that he should do so, for all is like an ocean blending. A touch set up in one corner of the universe affects everything else." Fr. Zossima to Alyosha in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamasov
". . . still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are." protagonist Alyosha to the Russian youth after Ilusha's death in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamasov
Coming from somewhere unseen,
a barn swallow shoots up into the bright sky,
dips down into the shadows, sweeps
back up,
brilliant and sunlit,
designing
in an old, unformulated language
the single word for joy.
from Bunch Grass (1969) Robert Sund
"But occasionally -- and these are the poems I am glad to have included here -- the life beckoned to the language and the language followed."
from Preface to An Origin Like Water, Eaven Boland
"I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never to forget.
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life , , ,
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead
Stored in its strongholds through the years" protagonist John Shade in "Pale Fire," Canto Three, from
Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.
"Touch ... cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering." From William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom!
"There is a might-have-been that is more true than truth." Rosie Coldfield in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
My desire
is always the same; wherever Life
deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
& soon my whole body
into the water.
Alice Walker
"And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains, so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Now the music's gone but they carry on
For their spirits been bruised, never broken
They will not forget but their hearts are set
On tomorrow and peace once again
For what's done is done and what's won is won
And what's lost is lost and gone for ever
I can only pray for a bright, brand new day In the town I love so well.
Phil Coulter, Irish composer reflects on "the troubles" in Derry, Northern Ireland
They've earned the right to order us
to break up our sleep
to come awake
to shake off once and for all
this lassitude.
Claribel Alegria writing in "Nocturnal Visits" of the crippled, burnt-out heroes of the Nicaraguan Revolution
"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us." Marcel Proust
"Howard's life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction . . . college, marriage . . . his parents still living. He had kept kept away from any real harm, from those forces he knew existed that could cripple or break down a man if the luck went bad, if things suddenly turned." from "A Small Good Thing" Raymond Carver
In the lamplight there was something about their faces. It was nice or nasty. There was no telling. from ""Why Don't You Dance?" Raymond Carver
[Carver's stories] . . . "a world of chance and ordinary loss brought into consequence." Tess Gallagher
Also poetry
doesn't pretend to know answers and speaks best
in questions, the way children do
who want to know everything, and don't believe
only what they're told. from "I Have Never Wanted to March" Tess Gallagher
"[Baby Suggs] told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine." from Beloved, Toni Morrison
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"the fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
"A Man Said to the Universe" Stephen Crane
"It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by what exists not." Daniel DeFoe
"The time had come for [Gabriel] to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland." from "The Dead." James Joyce
"Dirty cleans . . . poisons . . . the only cures. The remedy is where you least expect it. Clever of nature." Ruminations of Leopold Bloom from Calypso chapter of Ulysses, James Joyce
"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can either compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." from The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera
“An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” – John William Gardner
Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green St. --
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on the coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end. from "Halley's Comet" Stanley Kunitz
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am. from "Touch Me" Stanley Kunitz
You ranged the North Atlantic track
from Port-of-Spain to Baffin Bay,
edging between the ice-floes
through the fat of summer,
lob-tailing, breaching, sounding,
grazing in the pastures of the sea
on krill-rich orange plankton
crackling with life . . .
Master of the whale-roads,
let the white wings of the gulls
spread out their cover.
You have become like us,
disgraced and mortal." From "The Wellfleet Whale" Stanley Kunitz
"The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast at looking at him and then out the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended or cheated or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, to convert life into truth, he had not learned." "The Divinity School Address," Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. "Down By the Salley Gardens" W.B. Yeats
But Love pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
"Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop" W.B. Yeats
"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy." Said of one of his friends, W.B. Yeats
"For without the creation of . . . archetypes -- without such subliminal imprinting -- it is almost impossible for us to possess a common cultural awareness." Introduction: "Akutagawa Ryunosuke: Downfall of the Chosen" Haruki Murakami
"If I were a girl," he said to the stone, and was going out with a self-centered bastard like me, I'd blow my stack. I'm sure of it now that I look back on it. I don't know how they all put up with me for so long. It's amazing." Hoshino in Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
"Quidquid recipitur ad modem recipientis recipitur." (Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the one receiving it!) Scholastic axium probably from Aquinas.
So I think I know how they must feel:
ripped off, shook down, taken to the cleaners.
What they'd like to do now is smash a phone against a wall.
But they can't, so each one flies to a bare branch and screams.
from "The Crows Start Demanding Royalties" Lucia Perillo
They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. from "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" Ursula K. LeGuin
"Some people say that life is strange, but compared to what?" Steve Forbert, songwriter, Alive on Arrival album
He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light. "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" Leo Tolstoy
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. "The Metamorphosis" Franz Kafka
"But after a while you stand up, wipe the frost out of your ear, and then start walkin' toward somewheres else that ain't near no bridge." From Ironweed William Kennedy
"It is difficult in any work of art to fillet subject-matter from the presentation of subject-matter, and we may find in Joyce's attempt to make a sort of encyclopedia with a heart . . . a sufficient artistic, as opposed to technical, intention." From Re-Joyce, commenting on James Joyce's Ulysses, Anthony Burgess
"Mindfulness is at the sae time a means and an end, the seed and the fruit . . . the presence of mindfulness means the presence of life, and therefore mindfulness is also the fruit, making it possible to live fully each minute of life." Thich Nhat Hanh
"But nothing can't stop you from wishin'. You can't beat nobody down so low till you can rob 'em of they will."
From Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint --
No occuption either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. From "The Dry Salvages" in The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
"I have been reproached for suggesting that existentialism is a form of humanism . . . Existentialism will not take man as the end, since man is still to be tetermined. Whe have no right to believe dtthat humanity is something to which we could set up a cult. Existentialism is not despair. It declares that even if God did exist, that would make no difference." From "Existentialism is a Humanism" Jean-Paul Sartre
"Because there is a fertile dilemma, a rich imbalance somewhere in your life or heart or understanding, you write a poem."
From Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and their Craft, Jane Hirshfield in conversation with Bill Moyers
"In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into the transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions. These form the prima materia of my scientific work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked had crystallized." From Prologue to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung
"Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline." From "Community, Knowing, and Spirituality in Education" Parker J. Palmer
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour "Auguries of Innocence" William Blake
Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.
From "for strong women" Marge Piercy
Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others,
what we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.
From The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme
The Clasp by Sharon Olds
She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,
"Never, never, again," the righteous
chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very
fast-grab, crush, crush,
crush, release-and at the first extra
force, she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me. This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love
was this.
"We are one organism among many, one ensouled form among a multitude." From The Secret Teachings of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner
"Even if skies won't clear/ there is reason enough to love the moon." From "Dissolution of a Marriage, after the eruption of Mt. St. Helen's" in A Moon Over Wings, Thomas Aslin
"We have all heard people describe other people, in a derogatory way, as being 'full of imagination.' The fact is that if you are not full of imagination, you are not very sane." Buckminster Fuller
The human race is a single being
Created from one jewel
If one member is struck
All must feel the blow
Only someone who cares for the pain of others
Can truly be called human from "Bustan" (Garden) Saadi (1200 - 1291)
"The states of birth, suffering, love, and death are extreme states -- extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. . . . [T] war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does , at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real."
From "The Creative Dilemma" James Baldwin
"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." Arundhati Roy
"The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on Her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads." From Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion Greg Boyle, S.J., founder of Homeboy Industries, East Los Angeles
"How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known." From The Awakening by Kate Chopin
"Well, everybody's human only in some degree. Some more than others."
"Some very little?"
"That's the way it seems. Very little . . ."
"I thought everyone was born human."
"It's not a natural gift at all. Only the capacity is natural." from Mr. Sammler's Planet Saul Bellow
"Friend," said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, "having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose to return whence I came. I have scruples touching the matter thouu wot'st of."
"Sayest thou so?" replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. "Let us walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as we go; and if I convince thee not thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the forest yet."
from "Young Goodman Brown" Nathaniel Hawthorne
Willy: The Supreme Court! And he didn't even mention it!
Charley: He don't have to -- he's going to do it!
From Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller
Save me from a stupid life! I prayed.
Leave me anything but a stupid life.
From "Poet's Progress" Lorna Dee Cervantes
"I believe in reincarnation."
She grinned and looked up at him. "So what did someone do to come back as you?"
From Border Songs: A Novel Jim Lynch
"Chuck hits print and when he bends over to pick up the print-out I am finally given a gift, the kind of thing that makes me thank Jesus' blues, the kind of vision that makes me believe that I can turn around this long losing streak, the first sign of light in a very dark tunnel: Chuck has a bald-spot!" From The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter
“So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, ‘I’m going to lose this thing, and then I’m going to be haunted by this song forever. I’m not good enough, and I can’t do it.’ And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, ‘Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.’” Elizabeth Gilbert speaking of Tom Waits who references Leonard Cohen
"He would do the work himself, he decided, his face seeming to sparkle, as at the idea of a holy war. But what was more important, he would do it with laughter, for it occurred to him that joy resembled mourning and was, if anything, just as powerful and profound." From The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant
Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,
even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.
from "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July" by Billy Collins
“Purity does not lie in separation from, but in a deeper penetration into the universe.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin