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Words From Others


"The theft of words is not punishable by law." --Brillat-Savarin


"If we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of [those] who are called the opposition." --Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, speech, April 4, 1967

"I need these places . . . when I say these words to other people, the thoughts are usually dismissed . . . People give me a kind of shrug as if I were entitled to my hobby, just as they are entitled to their favorite ways of killing time. Somehow in their eyes the wild ground is a thing like bowling�a reasonable activity if you're interested in that sort of thing . . . I cannot abide this reaction . . . [I]t is madness." --Charles Bowden, Frog Mountain Blues (University of Arizona Press, 1987)

"No species is inherently a pest, and any species may become one." --Aldo Leopold, from "What Is a Weed?" in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1991)

�Heroism can involve merely staying the same . . . from day to day, maintaining your individuality and your integrity.� --Former mountain climber Walter Bonatti, The Mountains of My Life (Modern Library, 2001)

�All kinds of deprivation pass unnoticed�until whatever it is that one has blithely done without abruptly becomes available.� --David Roberts, On the Ridge Between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined (Simon and Schuster, 2005)

"There is a rancorous suspicion in America of whatever seems literary, not to mention a growing reluctance on the part of young people to read anything..." --Susan Sontag, On Photography

"Every natural form--palm leaves and acorns, oak leaves and sumach and dodder--[is an] untranslatable aphorism..." --Henry David Thoreau, journal, August 6, 1845

"The small everyday mysteries are a lot like feral kittens. It takes considerable affection and devotion to coax them out of the woodpiles." --Roman Loranc, photographer, LensWork (Nov./Dec. 2005)

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." --Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic" (from A Sand County Almanac

"As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend." --Henry David Thoreau, from "Monday" in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

"Let things alone; let them weigh what they will; let them soar or fall. To succeed in letting only one thing alone in a winter morning, if it be only one poor frozen-thawed apple that hangs on a tree, what a glorious achievement!"
--Henry David Thoreau (from a letter to Harrison Blake, April 3, 1850)

"Art is God's way of doing your own thing."
--Michael McKenzie, Used Mike's Zines

"Can a shepherd without sheep be called a shepherd?.... [M]y whole bent is toward not admitting the idea of an �lite, of believing that to become more and more human (as I wish to do) means just the opposite, to admit all the ways in which one fails, to join with others in a great invisible community of the nonleaders and the nonled, simply plain human beings in a universal struggle to survive with grace."
--May Sarton, from The House by the Sea

"A complicated problem is only further complicated by being simplified. A state of confusion is never made comprehensible by being given a plot. Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them."
--Laura Riding, in Anarchism is Not Enough

"Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without."
--Henry David Thoreau, from "Wednesday," in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

"We are independent of the change we detect. The longer the lever the less perceptible its motion. It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. The hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste. All good abides with [the person] who waiteth wisely; we shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurrying over the hills of the west."
--Henry David Thoreau, from "Monday" in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

It was my destiny to love and say goodbye.
--Pablo Neruda, from Still Another Day (Copper Canyon Press, 1984; translated by William O'Daly)

"There�s no life
that can�t be immortal
if only for a moment."

--Wislawa Szymborska, in View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

"I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order." --Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 (Harcourt, 1998)

"The sole aim of the world is to glory in itself unceasingly and to glorify us too, even amid our despair." --Jacques R�da quoted in John Taylor's Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Transaction Publishers, 2004)

"It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel self-conscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone close by is thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery not diversion that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling abject that quickens my mind and makes it immensely receptive to fugitive impressions. Later, these impressions might be refuted or deleted, but they might also be verified and refined; and in any case I had the satisfaction of finishing the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of rest. Have a nice time, people said to me at my send-off at South Station. It was not precisely what I had hoped for. I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude." --Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (Houghton Mifflin, 1979)

"As for health, consider yourself well. Do not engage to find things as you think they are. Do what nobody else can do for you-- Omit to do anything else." --Henry David Thoreau (from a letter to Harrison Blake, August 9, 1850)

"Hope is a longing for something over which you have no control; it means you are powerless.... I'm not, for example, going to say, 'I hope I eat something tomorrow.' I'll just do it. On the other hand, I hope that the next time I get one a airplane, the plane won't crash.... When we realize how much power we actually do have, however, we no longer have to 'hope' at all. We simply do the work.... We do whatever it takes.... The only question is whether we are willing to do so." --Derrick Jensen, from The Ecologist (Feb. 2004)

"The gods neither hope nor doubt." --Thoreau, Feb. 20, 1840

"What does it mean...that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring the world? What is the life that I should live?" --Mary Oliver, from Long Life and Other Essays (Da Capo, 2004)

"Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us a maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force." --Ibid.

"Past a certain point of magnification, all portraits become landscapes." --Frances Bour�ly', from Hidden Beauty: Microworlds Revealed (Abrams, 2002)

"There is no law so strong which a little gladness does not transgress." --Thoreau, journal, Jan. 3, 1853

"Nature is a paradise for outlaws." --Ibid.

"Thank God, [humans] cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth." --Thoreau, journal, Jan. 3, 1861

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks -- who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived ��from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going a la Sainte Terre,�� a Saunterer -- a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. --Henry David Thoreau, from "Walking" (derived from journal dated Jan. 10, 1851)

"What [woodchoppers] know is very slow to get into books. Science does not embody all that [people] know--only what is for [people] of science." --Thoreau, journal, Jan. 7, 1851

"I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage." --Thoreau, Jan. 10, 1851

"How many communications may we not lose through inattention?" --Ibid.

"I have heard that there is a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance." "For ... ignorance sometimes is not only useful but beautiful, while ... knowledge is oftentimes worse than useless, beside being ugly. In reference to important things, whose knowledge amounts to more than a consciousness of ... ignorance? Yet what more refreshing and inspiring knowledge than this?" --Thoreau, Feb. 9, 1851

"Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

...Last night I saw the new moon emerge from a shoal of clouds and hang for a time beyond the black silhouette of a shaggy, giant Douglas fir. I stopped to look. And what I saw was the moon-- the moon itself, nothing else; and the tree, alive and conscious in its own spiral of time; and my hands, palms upward, raised toward the sky. We were there. We are. That is what we know. This is all we can know. And each such moment holds more magic and miracle and mystery than we--so long as we are less than gods--shall ever be able to understand. Holds all that we could possibly need--if only we can see. There are no further worlds."

--Edward Abbey (from "Science With a Human Face" in Abbey's Road)

"We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else." --Henry Thoreau (journal, November 4, 1858)

"To sigh under the cold cold moon for a love unrequited, is to put a slight upon nature; the natural remedy would be to fall in love with the moon and the night, and find our love requited." --Henry Thoreau (from his journals at age 23 or so)

"I wish to hear the silence of the night, for the silence is something positive and to be heard. I cannot walk with my ears covered. I must stand still and listen with open ears, far from the noises of the village, that the night may make its impression on me. A fertile and eloquent silence. Sometimes the silence is merely negative, an arid and barren waste in which I shudder, where no ambrosia grows. I must hear the whispering of myriad voices. Silence alone is worthy to be heard...

The silence rings; it is musical and thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible. I heard the unspeakable."

--Henry D. Thoreau (Journal, Jan. 21, 1853)

"The life of civilized people is full of conventional little lies." --Peter Kropotkin (from Memoirs of a Revolutionist)

"Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way its bounty is received." --Richard Nelson (The Island Within)

"Noise... The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization." --Ambrose Bierce

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." --H.D. Thoreau (from "The Pond in Winter" in Walden)

"It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost..." --H.D. Thoreau (from "The Village" in Walden)

"Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs." --Ibid.

"Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing." --H.D. Thoreau (from "Visitors" in Walden)

"Most of us... trim a little here, compromise a bit there, and too often we persuade ourselves that the means justify the end.... This we all know; it is history, and it is personal experience. But how few of us dare admit it even in the solitude of our own heart; how few have the courage and honesty to question their activity and life, and ask themselves, Do my means justify my end? are they in accord? are they one and the same? Voltairine [de Cleyre] had the courage and the honesty. Her whole life was motivated by unswerving devotion to the cause she had made her own, by never-conforming and never-compromising loyalty to herself... She was one of those rare spirits whose staunch devotion to the ideal permeated her every act and every breath of her life and gave strength and encouragement to all her friends and co-workers in the cause... Her life was a protest against all sham, a challenge to all hypocrisy, and an inspiration for social rebellion... [She was] one of those who, in [her] own beautiful words, 'choose their own allegiance and serve it. Who will say a word to their souls and keep it -- keep it not when it is easy, but when it is hard-- keep it when the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder before, and one�s eyes are blinded and one�s ears deafened with the war of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray dreariness that never lifts.'"

--Alexander Berkman

"It is never too late to give up our prejudices."

--H.D. Thoreau (from "Economy" in Walden)

"The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad." --Ibid.

"[People] have become the tools of their tools." --Ibid.

"Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them- who were above such trifling." --Ibid.

"My greatest skill has been to want but little." --Ibid.

"There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me- some of its virus mingled with my blood. No- in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much." --Ibid.

"I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself." --Ibid.

"Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings. Take your time, and set about some free labor." --Ibid.

"The living are soft and yielding;
the dead are rigid and stiff.
Living plants are flexible and tender;
the dead are brittle and dry.

Those who are stiff and rigid are the disciples of death.
Those who are soft and yielding are the disciples of life.

The rigid and stiff will be broken.
The soft and yielding will overcome.

--Lao Tzu (from Tao Te Ching)

"Robbers are far less dangerous than a well-organized government."

--Peter Kropotkin paraphrasing Leo Tolstoy (from "Anarchism", in The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910)

"I am struck once again by the unutterable beauty, terror, and strangeness of everything we think we know."

--Edward Abbey (from "Death Valley" in The Journey Home)

"We�re all undesireable elements from somebody�s point of view."

--Edward Abbey (from "A Walk in the Park" in Abbey�s Road)

"There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who�s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated... To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me."

--Edward Abbey (from "Walking" in The Journey Home

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just [person] is also a prison."

--H.D. Thoreau (from "Civil Disobedience")

"Last night a bomb exploded on the veranda But sounds of birds sweeten the air this morning.
I hear the fragrant trees, look in the garden,
Find two silent clusters of ripe guavas."

--Lam Thi My Da ("Garden Fragrance", from 6 Vietnamese Poets, Curbstone Press, 2002)

"Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss."

--Edward Abbey (from "Floating" in Down the River, E. P. Dutton, 1982)

"I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature."

--Edward Abbey (from Down the River)

"I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls..."

"Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening; reminiscences of our sanest hours? The voice of nature is always encouraging."

--H.D. Thoreau (Journal, March 1858)

"I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house."

--H.D. Thoreau (from "Solitude" in Walden)

"It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I [am] in a thrilled and expectant mood, perhaps wading in some remote swamp where I have just found something novel and feel more than usually remote from the town. Or some rare plant which for some reason has occupied a strangely prominent place in my thoughts for some time will present itself. My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things."
--H.D. Thoreau, journals, September 2, 1856

"...We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. We must make root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day. I am sensible that I am imbibing health when I open my mouth to the wind. Staying inside the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is in this sense a hospital. A night and a forenoon is as much confinement to those wards as I can stand..."
--Ibid., December 29, 1856

"I would rather hear a single shrub oak leaf at the end of a wintry glade rustle of its own accord at my approach, than receive a shipload of stars and garters from the strange kings and peoples of the earth."
--Ibid., February 8, 1856

"Anything but black clothes." --Ibid., May 8, 1856

"In my darkest times I have to walk, sometimes alone, in some green place."

--Barbara Kingsolver (from Small Wonder)

When I am writing
I am not here
And when I return
I am gone.

--Pablo Neruda

"The whole world is my signficant other." --Stanley Moses

"Nature trumps art effortlessly, patiently, every time." --Leavenworth Jackson

"Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Self-Reliance"

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." --Ibid.

Who can... avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable." --Ibid

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the [humanity] of every one of its members.... Whoso would be [human] must be a nonconformist...." --Ibid.

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. " --Ibid.

"The great story of the night is the moon's adventures with the clouds. What innumerable encounters she has had with them!"

--Thoreau, Journals, June 25, 1852

"It is a genial and reassuring day; the mere warmth of the west wind amounts almost to balminess.... We are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness; winter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels..."

"Not only narrow but rough is the way that leadeth to life everlasting."

"My steps are symbolic steps." --Ibid., March 21, 1853

"The Metamorphosis of nature shows itself in nothing more than this that there is no word in our language that cannot become typical to us of nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a Mist; a Spider's Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold, & it will give the imagination keen pleasure. Swifter than light the World converts itself into that thing you name & all things find their right place under this new & capricious classification. There is no thing small or mean to the soul. It derives as grand a joy from symbolizing the Godhead or his Universe under the form of a moth or a gnat as of a Lord of Hosts. Must I call the heaven & the earth a maypole & country fair with booths or an anthill or an old coat in order to give you the shock of pleasure which the imagination loves and the sense of spiritual greatness? Call it a blossom, a rod, a wreath of parsley, a tamarisk-crown, a cock, a sparrow, the ear instantly hears & the spirit leaps to the trope..."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson (journals, July/Aug 1841)

"When you spend your life in a cautionary crouch, the greatest relief of all may come from simply standing up."

--Jeffrey Kluger (Time Magazine, April 2, 2001)

"Any action or thought which injures the human imagination is evil."

--Kenneth Patchen (from Sleepers Awake)

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it."

--James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time (more quotations here here)

"No point wasting time or energy worrying about things in advance--especially not a mere rapid on a lovely river. If I happen to drown... which is highly unlikely but possible, it�s not important. If I embarrass myself, floundering, swimming for dear life and being rescued, that�s even less important. If I manage to slide through with aplomb, less important still. What�s important is not to have done Lava Falls but to do it. What matters is to enter the rapid and live its 10 or 20 seconds of magisterial chaos as acutely as possible."

--David Quammen, from "The River Jumps Over the Mountain" (National Geographic Adventure, Jan/Feb. 2002)

"I have wallowed in grief for the lonesome, deliberate seep of my love into the air like the smell of uneaten popcorn greening to rubbery staleness."

--Katherine Dunn, from her novel Geek Love (1989)

"What I am arguing for ... is a politics of integrity, of being whole. A political practice that sacrifices neither the global nor the local, ignores neither the institutional power structures nor their most personal impact on the lives of individual people. That integrates what oppression keeps fracturing. That restores connections, not only in the future we dream of, but right here in the gory, tumultuous, hopeful, messy, and inconsistent present."

"The refusal to cooperate with our dehumanization even when we may not be able to stop it increases our reserves of dignity and hope. In that moment we have begun the process of recovery--of reclaimed humanity--that is both the ultimate outcome and the most essential ingredient of our liberation. And although there is a critical role for allies in bearing witness to and taking a strong moral stance against the abuse, this activism must be by the traumatized on their own behalf."

Only through mourning everything we have lost can we discover that we have in fact survived; that our spirits are indestructible. Only through mourning can we reach a place of clean anger in which we stand with all the abused and hold the abusers accountable. Only through mourning can we reconnect to the love in our lives and lose our fascination with the ones who harmed us. And only if we fully acknowledge and grieve the hurts can we possibly find genuine compassion for the perpetrators...."

--Aurora Levin Morales (Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity, South End Press, 1998)

"�the woodpecker [is] eating into my sound world and I make a salutary image of him for my own use. In my Paris apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I �naturalize� the noise by imagining that I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden. And finding everything quite natural, I say to myself �That�s my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree.� This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me."

--Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)

"Despair says I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to."

"They gave me most who took most gladly of my love."

"What I hope for is more hope."

--James Richardson (from "Vectors: Forty-five Aphorisms and Ten-second Essays" in The Best American Poetry 2001)

"Tonight... I will set the record crooked."

"The world is a skirt I want to lift up."

--Hanif Kureishi (Intimacy)

"Never go shopping for kiwis in a shoe store."

--Karen Salmansohn (How to Be Happy, Dammit: A Cynic's Guide to Spiritual Happiness)

"This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers."

--Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

"A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time."

"Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless."

--Ed Abbey (from "Water", Desert Solitaire)

"O the of it all."

--Edward Gorey

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

--Franz Kafka

"The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak with those who want anything more than truth."

--Adrienne Rich

"We're all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you've been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there's no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. It isn't until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your insolvable problems--the ones that make you who you truly are--that you're ready to find a life-long mate. Only then do you finally know what you're looking for: You're looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the *right* wrong person--someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, 'This is the problem I want to have.'"

--Andrew Boyd (Daily Afflictions)

"I'll call you tomorrow. I'd like for you to write me sometime, even if it's only three words. I don't know why I'm asking you this but I know that I need you to write me. Do you want to?"

--Frida Kahlo, to Alejandro Gomez Arias, October 12, 1934 (from Cartas Apasionadas: The Letters of Frida Kahlo (Chronicle Books, 1995)

"I hardly remember your voice, but the pain of you
floats in some remote current of my blood.
I carry you in my depths, trapped in the sludge
like one of those corpses the sea refuses to give up."

--Rafael Guill�n (from "I Hardly Remember", in I'm Speaking: Selected Poems, translated by Sandy McKinney)

"We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should some day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked--how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?"

--Alain de Botton in On Love (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993)

"I am in love with poetry. Everywhere I turn this, my weakness, smites me."

--Ted Berrigan, "Words For Love" (cited on dedication page of Anne Waldman's Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews, & Manifestos; Coffee House Press, 2001)

"�if joy, then with a touch of fear; if despair, then not without some quiet hope."

--Wislawa Szymborska, from "Our Ancester�s Short Lives" in Poems: New and Collected, 1957-1997, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (Harcourt, 1998)

"As Franz Kafka put it, you may not destroy someone else's world unless you are prepared to offer a better one. But no redemption can be found in the avoidance of difficult issues. Redemption comes only after we have moved through the horrors of the present situation to the better world that lies beyond it. By confronting the problem as courageously as we can and at the same time presenting alternatives, our barriers to clarity, including our own false hopes, may crumble to reveal previously unseen possibilities."

--Derrick Jensen, from A Language Older Than Words (Context, 2000)

"I do not know much of love poetry, but I do know it enough that, when my fingers resort to something like that, I sense that it seems more like a strawberry malted than a love sonnet."

--Sup. Marcos in "Insurgentas! (The sea in March), Letter 6e"

"Labels act as mini-concentration camps, where each one of us is defined by a given level of impotence."

-- Network of Alternative Resistance Manifesto

"We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them."

--Alain de Botton, from The Consolations of Philosophy

"I have for a long time been of the opinion that the quantity of noise anyone can comfortably endure is in inverse proportion to [that person's] mental powers... [The person] who habitually slams doors instead of shutting them with the hand... is not merely ill-mannered, but also coarse and narrow-minded... We shall be quite civilized only when... it is no longer anyone's right to cut through the consciousness of every thinking being... by means of whistling, howling, bellowing, hammering, whipcracking... and so on."

Arnold Schopenhauer, quoted in Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy

"Love... interrupts at every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while even the greatest minds. It does not hesitate... to interfere with the negotiations of [politicians] and the investigations of the learned. It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts... It sometimes demands the sacrifice of... health, sometimes of wealth, position and happiness."

Ibid, p. 185

"[Schopenhauer] gave a name to the force within us which he felt invariably had precedence over reason, a force powerful enough to distort all of reason's plans and judgments, and which he termed the will-to-life (Wille zum Leben) - defined as an inherent drive within human beings to stay alive and reproduce. The will to life led even committed depressives to fight for survival when they were threatened by a shipwreck or grave illness. It ensured that the most cerebral, career-minded individuals would be seduced by the sight of gurgling infants, or if they remained unmoved, that they were likely to conceive a child anyway, and love it fiercely on arrival. And it was the will-to-life that drove people to lose their reason over comely passengers encountered across the aisles of long-distance trains."

--Alain de Botton from The Consolations of Philosophy

"The 'problem' of amur honeysuckle is not the plant's fault, of course. It is merely doing what any organism would do under the circumstances: increasing and multiplying to replenish the earth.... Given ideal conditions, it will grow; it will express itself; it will flourish. This is the birthright and impulse of any life-form; call it wildness if you like."

--John Talmadge (from "Resistance to Urban Nature," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2001)

"The strongest desire known to human life is to continue living."

[Fortune cookie fortune, Apr 18, 2001]

"Whenever an idea is dominant, I find that maybe I shouldn't stay in that camp."

"One of the things I always tried to do was to get students to close their minds--not to be so accepting of so many casual or lazy ideas."

"One thing ... ought to be every human being's birthright--namely, a beloved person to share cookies with before turning in to bed."

--Yi-Fu Tuan (geographer profiled in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 16, 2001)

"Christian by birth, Buddhist by philosophy, heathen by nature."

--Samuel Mockbee, architect (self-description)

"I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy...
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder."

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti (from "I Am Waiting" in A Coney Island of the Mind, 1955)

"An honorable human relationship--that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word 'love'--is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us."

--Adrienne Rich (from Arts of the possible: essays and conversations)

"The facts of this world seen clearly
are seen through tears."

--Margaret Atwood (from "Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written")

"[Some] people never seem to learn from experience. No matter how often they [see] the lion devour the lamb, they continue to cling to the hope that the nature of the beast might change. If only the lion could get to know the lamb better, they [argue], or talk matters over, he would surely learn to appreciate his gentle brother and thereby grow gentle himself."

--Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Volume 2

"The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life."

--Seamus Heaney

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the
Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination."

--John Keats

The gods don't care about a few wrong notes if you strike them with a full heart.

--Bill Holm (from Eccentric Islands)

There are truths that can only be learned when you're dancing in chains.

--Diane Ackerman (on poetic form)

How well I know those persistent unsatisfied glances of yours.

--Anna Akhmatova (translation by Judith Hemschemeyer)

An American will build a house in which to pass ... old age and sell it before the roof is on ... plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing ... clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest ... take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with ... changing desires...

The prevailing temper is at the same time ardent and soft, violent and enervated. [People] are often less afraid of death than of enduring effort toward one goal.

--Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America

In nature there's no blemish but the mind;
None can be called deformed but the unkind.

--William Shakespeare (Twelth Night)

I never looked at the memorial as a wall...but as an edge...

--Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial)

...the sun goes down in waves of ether
in such a way that I can't tell
if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is in me again.

--Anna Akhmatova (translation by Jane Kenyon)

I love you like forty
fond sisters.

--Anna Akhmatova (translation by Judith Hemschemeyer)

Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.

Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

--Rainer Rilke (translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

I want to gather you up again
in a vessel that makes you glad.

--Rainer Rilke (translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)



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