are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Life is a river. Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past--connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially."
--Wally Lamb


"There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy skull on skull, through soft skin and softer flesh. He thought: skulls separate people. In this one sense, I could say, they would say, I lose myself in her. But in that bone box, she thinks and thinks, as I think in mine, things the other won't hear, can't hear, though we go on like this for sixty years. What does she think I am? He had no idea. He had no idea what she was."
--A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden


"I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward."
--Stanislaw J. Lec


"You don't get to choose the heroes...The heroes choose themselves."
--Paul Levine


"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
--Voltaire


"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."
--Elbert Hubbard


"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
--Charles de Gaulle


"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
--Marianne Williamson


"To defeat them, first we must understand them."
--Elie Wiesel


"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."
--Oscar Wilde


"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
--Umberto Eco


"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
--Søren Kierkegaard


"We invent what we love, and what we fear."
--John Irving


"I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds 'round my neck."
--Emma Goldman


"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
--Tom Robbins


"You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by."
--James M. Barrie


"I've been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."
--Mark Twain


"Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have."
--Truman Capote


"I sell souls at the side of the road. Would you like to take a number?"
--The Distillers, "Hall of Mirrors"


"Miniature"
The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
made for a child's fairytale. The young officer sitting opposite
is buried in the old armchair. He doesn't look at her.
He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles,
throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup's handle. The clock
holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
The moment has gone. It's too late now. Let's drink our tea.
Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,
with its little yellow wheels of lemon
parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?
--Yannis Ritsos


"I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational."
--John Wilmot, A Satyre against Mankind


"First He Looked Confused"
I could not lie anymore so I started to call my dog "God."

First he looked
confused,

then he started smiling, then he even
danced.

I kept at it: now he doesn't even
bite.

I am wondering if this
might work on
people?
--Tukarum, translated by Daniel Ladinsky


"Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet expect the beating of your heart."
--Jeanne Marie Laskas


"A caterpillar is letting itself down on a thread, twirling slowly like a rope artist, spiraling towards his chest. It's a luscious, unreal green, like a gumdrop, and covered with tiny bright hairs. Watching it, he feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of tenderness and joy. Unique, he thinks. There will never be another caterpillar just like this one. There will never be another such moment of time, another such conjunction.

"These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency."
--Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

"We had a very balanced group. We had three men and three women. It was such a great group because of the way [Laura Nyro] put it together. I questioned a lot of things at first and then understood them. Things like having to have a female bass player or having to have a certain number of women and a certain number of men. I never thought in those terms for any other project I approached. But I understood for Laura that was a balance, nature; it was correct, it was right. It's the first time I ever saw anybody hire in terms of sexual balance, to make the group completely equal. It was important because her music required human relationships in the players. Every aspect of her songs were her."
--Jimmy Vivino, guitarist and Laura Nyro bandleader


"He caresses every bottle like it's the first one he's had
Saying, 'It ain't love, but it ain't bad' "
--Ani DiFranco, "Served Faithfully"


"And we get a little further from perfection
Each year on the road
I think that's called character
I think that's just the way it goes
But it's better to be dusty
Than polished like some store-window mannequin
Won't you touch me where I'm rusty,
Let me stain your hands?"
--Ani DiFranco, "Imperfectly"


"Unlike the Others"

Unlike the others, I am going to tell it to you straight.
This is what life is about: my bruised wet feet
half-clean from the shower, dripping and semi-swollen
with hot water and cold winter weather.
I am not going to talk to you about the moon,
the many adjectives which work. Tonight
is a broken toenail; the half-translucent white curve
hanging, displaced and solitary, a hook, a crook.
(Lorca, who lived a short life, would tell you
cuando sale la luna and would still say nothing
of the blisters, the bunions, the un-uniform surface,
the cost of living. The peeling limpid skin.)
The way the hair runs mermaid
wet over the shoulder-blades
the water in my armpit, the water in between my toes,
the water behind my knees and sneaking over my pelvis.
I cannot tell you what the moon looks like
from here, from the tiled steam of the
white-and-green bathroom,
smelling like an acre of skin, like raised nipples,
like wet genitals and loose water-softened scabs,
little white rounded mounds I long to peel back for pink.
(There is no such thing, William Carlos Williams,
as a pious wish to whiteness gone over.
There are only young women fresh out of the bath
with their hair wet slung over their shoulders
and their toe knuckle calluses happily peeling.)
--Jaida Jones


"Broadway was itself, always itself, a river of light and life that flowed through the shades and little fires of the city. Lucas felt, as he always did when he walked there, a queasy, subvert exaltation, as if he were a spy sent to another country, a realm of riches. He walked with elaborate nonchalance, hoping to be as invisible to others as they were visible to him.

"On the sidewalk around him, the last of the shoppers were relinquishing the street to the first of the revelers. Ladies in dresses the color of pigeons' breasts, the color of rain, swished along bearing parcels, speaking softly to one another from under their feathered hats. Men in topcoats strode confidently, spreading the bleak perfume of their cigars, flashing their teeth, slapping the stone with their licorice boots.

"Carriages rolled by bearing their mistresses home, and the newsboys called out, 'Women murdered in Five Points, read all about it!' Red curtains billowed in the windows of hotels, under a sky going a deeper red with the night. Somewhere someone played 'Lilith' on a calliope, though it seemed that the street itself emanated music, as if by walking with such certainty, such satisfaction, the people summoned music out of the pavement."
--Michael Cunningham, pgs. 7-8, Specimen Days


"Crazy, Simon thought. They're all crazy. Though of course the passengers on the Mayflower had probably been like this, too: zealots and oddballs and ne'er-do-wells, setting out to colonize a new world because the known world wasn't much interested in their furtive and quirky passions. It had probably always been thus, not only aboard the Mayflower but on the Viking ships; on the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María; on the first convoys sent off to explore Nadia, about which the people of Earth had harbored such extravagant hopes. It was nut jobs. It was hysterics and visionaries and petty criminals. The odes and monuments, the plaques and pageants, came later."
--Michael Cunningham, pg. 320, Specimen Days


"The earth--that is sufficient;
I do not want the constellations any nearer;
I know they are very well where they are;
I know they suffice for those who belong to them."
--Walt Whitman


"The superfluous is the most necessary."
--Voltaire


"To lead the people, walk behind them."
--Lao-Tzu


"Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself."
--George Santayana


"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's own ignorance."
--Confucius


"Failure is the foundation of success...success the lurking place of failure."
--Lao-Tzu


"There is a society in the deepest solitude."
--Benjamin Disraeli


"You can't say civilization isn't advancing, in every war they kill you in a new way."
--Will Rogers


"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
--Edgar Degas


"When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not, but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter."
--Mark Twain


"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
--Walt Disney


"The Shadow Voice"

My shadow said to me:
what is the matter

Isn't the moon warm
enough for you
why do you need
the blanket of another body

Whose kiss is moss

Around the picnic tables
The bright pink hands held sandwiches
crumbled by distance. Flies crawl
over the sweet instant

You know what is in these blankets

The trees outside are bending with
children shooting guns. Leave
them alone. They are playing
games of their own.

I give water, I give clean crusts

Aren't there enough words
flowing in your veins
to keep you going.
--Margaret Atwood


"His wings are gray and trailing, Azrael, Angel of Death,
And yet the souls that Azrael brings across the dark and cold
Look up beneath those folded wings,
And find them lined with gold"
--Robert Welsh