literary quote of the day (10/5/10)
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
-Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
-Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”
He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself.
-Flannery O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First”
He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.
Flannery O’Connor, “The Artificial Nigger”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDwQaVZuAjI?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]
October
And the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care
October
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on
And on
Now that I’m dead I know everything. This is what I wished would happen, but like so many of my wishes it failed to come true. I know only a few factoids that I didn’t know before. It’s much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.
Since being dead–since achieving this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness–I’ve learned some things I would rather not know, as one does when listening at windows or opening other people’s letters. You think you’d like to read minds? Think again.
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbdtq75xhlk?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]
“When I read the Bible, I find that I relate to the sinners, more than I relate to the saints."
Michael Pritzl, The Violet Burning
“Ditto”
Robby Prenkert, ‘everything and nothing’
“Good!” Johnson said savagely. He thrust his head forward. “Listen here,” he hissed, “I don’t care if he’s good or not. He ain’t right!"
Flannery O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First” (Rufus Johnson speaking)
‘Why is it that really beautiful people think everyone else in the world exists merely for their amusement?'
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
p.s. Is it bad that my blog is made up now almost entirely of words penned by authors I force 19 year olds to read in my classes?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFJUKIULsxk?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]
you’re so far away
and i won’t see you any day soon
we came a long way
and now you want to fly to the moon
all alone going your own way
i thought i owned your love
and now you say
ache, ache beautiful for me
go along and ache
ache beauty babe
Michael Roe, “Ache Beautiful”
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
—William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
(Salvador Dali, “The Persistence of Memory”)
In the Palace at 4 A.M. you walk from one room to the next by going through the walls. You don’t need to use the doorways. There is a door, but it is standing open, permanently. If you were to walk through it and didn’t like what was on the other side you could turn and come back to the place you started from. What is done can be undone. It is there that I find Cletus Smith.
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
My younger brother was born on New Year’s day, at the height of the influenza epidemic of 1918. My mother died two days later of double pneumonia. After that, there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.
-William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
Yes it is the dawn that has come. The tithoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.
Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
p.s. We might move in the direction of “emancipation from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear” if we shut off right wing talk radio and the Glenn Beck program and read good books and the Good Book instead. Or even just took a walk in the woods.
The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."
-Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”
Long ago, when I was a young man, my father said to me… “Norman, you like to write stories?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” Then he said, “Someday, when you’re ready… you might tell our family story. Only then will you understand what happened and why.”
(Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It)
“How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?”
-JM Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life
Sydney: “I want popcorn and ice cream."
Mama: “How about one or the other."
Sydney: “No, I think I want both.”
Burnt up a big brush pile in my back yard last night. Why is there so much pleasure to be had watching a big pile of sticks burn? Especially in the dark.
I like the “Cook’s Special."
Probably going to need a ride an extra twenty minutes on the bike tomorrow morning—I ate a whole small pizza myself tonight. Man, it was good.
This is my 200th post on this blog.
Big woop. Check out my nephew Calvin’s blog. He’s got like 8 gazillion posts and he’s only 9.
Let’s hope it never comes to this.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtIG4TuVnvg?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=640&h=385]
“If you abide in My word [hold fast to My teachings and live in accordance with them], you are truly My disciples. And you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.” Jesus, John 8:31-32
Tony Horton says something like the same thing. If you DO what I’m telling you, you’re a real student of muscle confusion. THEN you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
I watched the infomercial two years ago, and I got the facts. After two years of holding fast to his teachings, living in accordance with them, I know the truth. It’s liberating, dude. My body doesn’t ache like it used to.
And as a bonus, when I asked Jeanie if she noticed any difference in the way I looked, she said, “Oh yeah, big time.”
That’s what I’m talking about. :-)