261 quotes found
"The tempest unleashes an alphabet letters fall through the apertures of crazy angles to spell out the future uprooting the course of invention and enslaving the masters"
"I'm looking for the binding energy of a look a crop of reflections to be reaped in a winter of thorn when icebergs of illusion will melt to be served at high tea and the spaces between the poles pinned down"
"The stars are dreaming but they are laughing I see myself in the smile of a polar bear while turning the pages of an arctic sky reading the delirious lines that foretell the sovereignty of language and the rule of invisible birds"
"Lawrence is usually the first poet kids read in schools that they really like. It's a real turn-on for them."
"We have one called Commodity Aesthetics, which is our section on popular culture."
"The most important of the beat poets. He was a really true poet with an original voice, probably the most lyrical of those poets."
"The old San Francisco is under attack to the point where it's disappearing"
"Maybe a thousand dollars"
"When I joined City Lights in 1971 and started working with Lawrence, it was clear that it had been very much a center of protest, for people with revolutionary ideas and people who wanted to change society. And when I first began working at the little editorial office up on Filbert and Grant, people that Lawrence had known through the whole decade of the '60s were dropping in all the time, like Paul Krassner, Tim Leary, people who were working with underground presses and trying to provide an alternative to mainstream media. This was a period of persecution, and FBI infiltration of those presses."
"Ginsberg used to stay in the publishing house. Our editorial office had two rooms and a kitchen; it was a tiny place. And one of the rooms was kind of a guest room so that visiting authors could stay there. Allen would come sometimes for a week at a time or more. And he hung out in the store, also. The store had become quite a center for writers by that time. Ginsberg was working on "The Fall of America," which was his long chronicle of the Vietnam War, which is full of the anguish and passion and anger that so many people felt. The war had been going on for such a long time by then. That book won the National Book Award [in 1974]."
"Then (in 1981) we did a book by Geoffrey Rips called "Unamerican Activities," which was a documentation of the subversion of the underground press. That was when the Freedom of Information Act made those files available. We were shocked, we couldn't believe that our government had been bombing people, infiltrating their organizations. In fact, I think one of the files listed Lawrence as a "beatnik rabble-rouser.""
"During the '70s, when the Cold War was still on, we invited Voznesensky and Yevtushenko to come here. We had very large readings for them. It was a way of kind of culturally thawing the Cold War."
"The mood of the '50s is like today."
"We're still in a state of shock … We have our "Dump Bush and Cheney" sign in the window, which Lawrence [Ferlinghetti] painted himself. We're looking forward to impeachment or perhaps, indictments for war crimes."
"He found in the narcotic night world a kind of modern counterpart to the gothic castle — a zone of peril to be symbolically or existentially crossed."
"She is one of the best literary editors in the country and is why City Lights Books has grown and done well."
"One does not attend this movie; one enlists in it."
"The faces in New York remind me of people who had played a game and lost."
"Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon."
"If you talk to gangsters long enough, you’ll find out they’re just as bad as respectable people."
"In baseball, the true class enemy is not the boss, but the fan."
"Donald Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock's feathers. In any polity entitled to think itself civilized, persons with regard for their breeding would leave the room politely but definitely whenever Donald Trump entered it."
"For touching a people who want to forget ugly problems, no politician equals the one who has already forgotten them himself."
"The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world."
"He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities."
"Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time."
"Art is the triumph over chaos."
"I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone."
"The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness."
"A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies."
"For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty."
"I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another’s river views."
"When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit."
"What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power."
"Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world."
"All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life."
"My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats."
"He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates."
"...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers."
"..for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho."
"Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord."
"I'm wicked, as you say, and I'm rude and I'm boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots."
"When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand."
"Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers—they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery."
"I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind."
"Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two."
"We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual."
"One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence."
"The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony."
"The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another."
"People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary."
"At my back I hear the word—”homosexual”—and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world."
"A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind."
"His religious requirements—that the service come from Cranmer’s rites in the old prayer book, that it take 33 minutes or less, that the church be within 10 minutes’ driving distance and that the altar be sufficiently simple so that it wouldn’t remind him of a gift shop—limited his choice of parishes."
"I'm very fond of Cheever."
"I'm not like some writers who are very specific about their audience. Cheever talks about looking into the woods and he sees somebody walking there and he's writing for that person. My sense of an audience is very wide-maybe people in the distant future-in a sense, the universe."
"I love Cheever's mellifluous sentence-making or his kind of snatching images out of the blue, out of nowhere, and his charmingly eccentric, just-right endings."
"All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours."
"Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery."
"What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulations of Gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. the purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it."
"I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given."
"Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing."
"What a view, I said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence."
"I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there."
"At times I get the feeling I can't wait. Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn't mind if it came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive. You might say I've got the survival craze, the real bug. And to tell you the truth I don't think most other people have. They might cry and tear their hair and be ready for some short hysterical violence or other, but I think most of them wouldn't be too happy to give down and get it over with.... If everything wasn't dead, you could make a kind of life that wasn't out of touch with everything, with other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You'd die early, and you'd suffer, and your children would suffer, but you'd be in touch."
"I had the feeling that if it were perfectly quiet, if I could hear nothing, I would never wake up. Something in the world had to pull me back, for every night I went down deep, and if I had any sensation during sleep, it was of going deeper and deeper, trying to reach a point, a line or border."
"Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened."
"That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really — really — in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantasized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it."
"There was nothing in common, in the way he was lying, with any of the positions I had seen him in while he was alive, until I remembered the pose by the river in which I had most wanted to kill him. He now had that same relaxed, enjoying look of belonging anywhere he happened to be, and particularly in the woods."
"The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it -- I can feel it -- on different places on my body.... In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality."
"Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever."
"Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out, To demonstrate its suppleness Of veins, as he perfected his role."
"It was something like love From another world that seized her From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head Out of dew, without ever looking, her best Self to that great need."
"I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need."
"I have just come down from my father. Higher and higher he lies Above me in a blue light Shed by a tinted window."
"With the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air."
"She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs."
"Here they are. The soft eyes open. If they have lived in a wood It is a wood. If they have lived on plains It is grass rolling Under their feet forever."
"These hunt, as they have done But with claws and teeth grown perfect, More deadly than they can believe."
"Those that are hunted Know this as their life, Their reward: to walk Under such trees in full knowledge Of what is in glory above them, And to feel no fear."
"When I went to college (from 1959 to 1963), there were no women's studies courses, no anthologies that stressed a female heritage, no public women's movement. Poetry meant Yeats, Lowell, James Dickey. Without even realizing it, I assumed that the voice of the poet had to be male."
"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."
"I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."
"I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble."
"Yes, he said. I busted him and he busted me. That's fair, ain't it? The boy was still silent, calmly incredulous. No, Sylder went on, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that throws it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it."
"The man sat watching the road, the weedstem twirling in his mouth and the threadthin shadow of it going long and short upon his face like a sundial's hand beneath a sun berserk."
"And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird's first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare."
"Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone. She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said."
"Yes mam. I'm sorry you've had such troubles. Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death."
"And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief."
"What discordant vespers do the tinker's goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of the day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema."
"Drovers were racing brokenly across the milling hogs like wind through grass until a whole echelon of them careering up the outer flank forsook the land and faired into space with torn cries. Now the entire herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers that now upreared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were no true swineherds but disciples of darkness got among these charges to herd them to their doom."
"Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian."
"I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away."
"It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong. (p.71)"
"Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls. (p.128)"
"In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. (p.130)"
"He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he is sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their blood in history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him? (p.147)"
"Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath. (p.149)"
"You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said. The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said, I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one. (p.158)"
"He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death. (p.162)"
"If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only."
"The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all."
"When he looked back at the primadonna she was watching them through the spyglasses. As if she might better assess them in that way where they set forth upon the shadowbanded road, the coming twilight. Inhabiting only that ocular ground in which the country appeared out of nothing and vanished again into nothing, tree and rock and the darkening mountains beyond, all of it contained and itself containing only what was needed and nothing more."
"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless."
"Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case."
"Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy."
"You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value."
"He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?"
"He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new."
"The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again."
"He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof."
"If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?"
"In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept."
"The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them."
"The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one."
"Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty."
"Black: Belief aint like unbelief. If you a believer then you got to come finally to a well of belief itself and then you dont have to look no further. There aint no further. But the unbeliever has got a problem. He has set out to unravel the world, but everything he can point to that aint true leaves two new things layin there. If God walked the earth when he got done makin it then when you get up in the mornin' you get to put your feet on a real floor and you dont have to worry about where it come from. But if he didnt then you got to come up with a whole other description of what you even mean by real. And you got to judge everything by that same light. If light is is. Includin yourself. One question fits all."
"White: I long for Darkness. I pray for death, real death. And if I thought that in death I would meet the people I knew in life, I don't know what I would do. That would be the ultimate horror, the ultimate nightmare. If I thought I was gonna meet my mother again an' start all of that over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to... that would be the final nightmare. Goddamn Kafka on wheels."
"White: You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left."
"She slept and sleeping she dreamt that she was running after a train with her brother running along the cinderpath and in the morning she put that in her letter. We were running after the train Bobby and it was drawing away from us into the night and the lights were dimming away in the darkness and we were stumbling along the track and I wanted to stop but you took my hand and in the dream we knew that we had to keep the train in sight or we would lose it. That following the track would not help us. We were holding hands and we were running and then I woke up and it was day."
"In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?"
"He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be. After she left the quarry he sat alone until the small flames in their tins had guttered out one by one. Then just the dark of the countryside, the silence of it. The faint drone of a truck out on the highway."
"He wrote in his little black book by the light of the oil lamp. Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you. We pour water upon the child and name it. Not to fix it in our hearts but in our clutches. The daughters of men sit in half darkened closets inscribing messages upon their arms with razorblades and sleep is no part of their life."
"He climbed into the loft and sat at the tower window wrapped in his blanket. Spits of rain on the sill. Summer lightning far out to sea. Like the flare of distant fieldpieces. The patter on the tarp he’d stretched over his bed. He turned up the wick of the lamp at his elbow and took the notebook from its box and opened it. Then he stopped. He sat for a long time. In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete. The ages of men stretching grave to grave. An accounting on a slate. Blood, darkness. The washing of dead children on a board. The stone laminations of the world with their fossil prints unreckonable in form and number. My father’s latterday petroglyphs and the people upon the road naked and howling. The storm passed and the dark sea lay cold and heavy. In the cool metallic waters the hammered shapes of great fishes. The reflection in the swells of a molten bolide trundling across the firmament like a burning train. He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp. The straw roof hissing in the bellshaped dark above him and his shadow on the roughtroweled wall. Like those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods."
"Finally he leaned and cupped his hand to the glass chimney and blew out the lamp and lay back in the dark. He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue."
"Do you really believe in physics?"
": - I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown. Whatever that might mean."
"The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy."
"When Wittgenstein convinced Russell that all math is a tautology, Russell gave up on math."
": —Is it true?"
": —Russell said so."
"Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief."
"Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished."
"The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation."
"Your life is set upon you like a dog."
"If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose."
"The days are long but the years are short."
"You shouldn't worry about what people think of you because they don't do it that often."
"My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow."
"Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music."
"If the world has a mind then it's all worse than we thought."
"As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared."
"I thought about David Bohm. He wrote a really good book on quantum mechanics — largely because Einstein had half convinced him that the theory was faulty. He wanted to get down his thoughts on paper. By the time he'd finished the book he didn't believe in the theory."
"A group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of the creator’s brain not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike."
"Do you believe in an afterlife?"
": —I dont believe in this one."
": —Do you?"
": —I’ve no idea. It strikes me as extremely unlikely. But again the probability is not zero."
"How do you know you shouldnt? The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonderwhy the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good"
": —I’m not sure I see how that would work."
": —Neither does anybody else. Sometimes you get a clear sense that doing math is largely just feeding data into the substation and waiting to see what comes out. I’m not even sure that it’s all that wise to commit things to memory."
"Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking."
"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."
"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."
"And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar."
"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."
"I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion — that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."
"Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?"
"Am I not among the early risers and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider the perfection of the morning star above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees blue in the first light? Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them though it is only wind, that common thing, free to everyone, and everything?"
"What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?"
"Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same."
"Here is where it -- you are alone in your head, you are all alone inside your brain. and that makes it impossible to believe that anything, everything and anyone that you own, love or hateis real. we will never know if we are living or dreaming."
"What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw."
"You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it."
"I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same."
"Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death."
"But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness."
"Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light."
"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
"You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound."
"My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness"
"I don't know what God is. I don't know what death is.But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement."
"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."
"Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything."
"Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn't amuse me. Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing."
"So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God,one of which was you."
"then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that and the years before that you were not."
"Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function — to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory to the world, that good teacher."
"Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest."
"I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed."
"Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable."
"Poets—incredible nature poets like Mary Oliver, Gabriela Mistral, or Audre Lorde—look deeply at the world and make us feel like we are connected. Poetry that addresses the natural world helps us repair that connection. When you are paying attention to something, it’s a way of loving something. How can we continue to hurt something that we love?"
"Mary Oliver wanted to smell flowering pink bushes/and blossoming trees in Texas./Pull over, she said, at more than one corner. She/needed to absorb the scents./A city wasn't just a name./In her presence, babies might sing for the first time./She is like that."
"It’s a poem that becomes like an emblem poem for people."
"As readers and writers, we find a certain home in books and language and literature — like I hear a Mary Oliver poem, and it’s as if I’ve been her neighbor, because I’ve read so many of her poems, even though I’ve never spent a day in her town."
"she always carries a notebook. That’s one of her trademarks. And she said to me, “If you don’t have a notebook, you don’t get it again. You have to write things down as they come to you.”"
"Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I’m speaking or trying to speak"
"A magician’s business is with words. He may use other things to help him along—amulets and so forth—but it is within words that the power lies. To choose the wrong words may mean death. And so magicians learn, from the first, to use as few words as possible, to answer as few questions as we can."
"She felt that she had seen beneath the mask of the world, and she could not quite believe in that mask again."
"Your father was a very wise man. But you cannot acquire his wisdom by pretending to have it already."
"You think you can be as heroic as he was, simply by dying. But he doesn’t take courage to die. That’s easy. It takes courage to live."
"You are wrong, Rabbi. You did not kill your daughter. And it does not matter now if you could have done something to save her or not. To think about what might have happened is useless. You can think about what might have happened, turn it over and over in your mind until you can’t think of anything else. You can plan your revenge or—or suicide. But none of that can change the past. The dead—your daughter and my parents—they would want us to go on. To live."
"“You can’t ask questions like that,” André said. “The unconscious has its own logic.” But he looked a little puzzled, a little too tied to the world of logic and order."
"Collective insanity is boring. Individual insanity—that’s what interests me."
"They passed a closed police station. Someone had written on the wall, “It is forbidden to forbid.”"
"Suddenly he didn’t care if the revolution were lost or won, only that it be over."
"Movies should be silent, like dreams."
"“A novel?” André laughed. “The novel’s dead—don’t waste your time. The novel takes a small—oh, infinitely small—cut-and-dried section of so-called reality and calls it art. Your life is art. Don’t waste it trying to write a novel.”"
"Claude sighed. “All right, you’re a poet,” he said. “I don’t understand why poets can’t make the effort to get along like everyone else.” “Ah,” Robert said. “But we poets can’t understand why everyone else is making the effort.”"
"I’ve got to live up to their expectations by acting irresponsibly again."
"“Robert, how have you been? You look good. They’ve been telling me a fantastic story, I don’t believe a word of it…” Robert sat down at the table next to Paul and ordered grenadine. “It’s all true,” he said. “Every word of it, even the parts they made up.”"
"He knew that there could never be an apology enormous enough for what he had just said. He didn’t care. He was tired of people who told him what state his soul was in, André and Antonin and a few of the others who took their cue from André. He had gone through something, something so strange that even now he was not sure what it meant, but he knew he was somehow stronger for it. He would not give that up to be a follower again."
"You think you know what your life will be like thirty years from now and suddenly you’re doing something you couldn’t have planned five minutes ago."
"“I can’t believe this,” Mary said, whispering urgently. “Every time I talk to you I think I’ve heard the worst, and then you come along and say something even stupider.”"
"“Lots of people would give anything to be in your place.” “I’m not lots of people,” Mary said. “I’m me. That’s what I’ll never forgive, that you did all this without even asking me.”"
"Maybe art couldn’t survive it if was sponsored by the government. Maybe art always had to be subversive."
"You really can’t choose the people you’re going to like."
"Layla’s story, though not always accurate, was far more interesting than the truth."
"Three of her children were in school. At some time the government had recorded that Mama had three children of school age, so every day Mama sent three different children off to school. The teachers never seemed to notice."
"She was already caught in the enchanted net of the bookshelves. She walks down rows of books about history, science, cooking, a large section devoted to car repair. Her feet on the linoleum floor, and the young man turning pages, made the only sounds in the store. It’s like drinking, Claire thought, delighted, running her fingers over the spines. Worse, because the spell lasts longer. If you read, don’t drive."
"“It would make a good tourist attraction,” Mitchell said. Jara looked at him oddly, and for a moment he feared he’d said the wrong thing again. Then Jara laughed. “You Americans,” he said. “That is all you think about, your tourist attractions. You are the great spectators. The other countries of the world put on their shows for you, display their ruins, their pottery, their dances and religions. And you watch. You watch because your country has no past of its own. Is that right?” Mitchell shrugged. He had never really given it much thought. “But you are right,” Jara said. “It would make a good tourist attraction. That would be one way we could finance the excavation.” Ah ha, Mitchell thought. You laugh at the Americans, but when you need money for something we’re the first people you think of."
"We are all tourists in each others’ lives. We all have monuments and ruins, places of strange beauty and forbidden sites chained off and locked securely so that no visitors can get in. And none of us has the guidebook to anyone else, or even the list of most commonly used phrases. We just have to get along the best we can."
"That’s what’s missing, she thought. Everyone in the city is so passionate about things. Here they are only passionate about their religion. They’ve lost everything else."
"She sat silent for a moment. The real world always lay out there waiting, ready to ambush you with something you could not control. The history you’ve made up for your own private kingdom turns out to be the national epic of some obscure country."
"The good people of Iowa have debated issues ranging from nuclear Armageddon to universal health care. And then there’s 2016, when the top two Republican candidates in the dwindling hours before caucusgoers pick a nominee are throwing around this question: “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” It was Donald Trump who first raised the issue of Hawkeye State imbecility, in a mocking reference to a crush that Iowans had on Ben Carson last fall. And it’s the odious Ted Cruz who has been using Trump’s very words to goad Iowans into proving that they are not, in fact, so stupid as to back an ego-inflamed reality television star who makes fun of them."
"The problem is not that the people of Iowa are stupid. They are not, by most measurements. It’s that Iowa looks nothing like the rest of America. As a result, the winners, more often than not, are nationally unelectable extremists."
"You’re supposed to be vetting, Iowa. You’re supposed to be culling out the crazies. You’re supposed to recognize the fraud of Ted Cruz and how Donald Trump is playing you. For all your touted small-town verities, you’re not doing your job. Your bull manure detector is broken."
"At least we’ll hear less about corn subsidies and Corinthians II, or is it Two Corinthians? Discuss. No, don’t! Stupid, stupid people. Again, that’s Trump talking, not me. He uses that word to describe nearly everyone not named Donald J. Trump. He’s presented no governing philosophy, no policy details, nothing resembling even-keeled judgment. He’s running a combustible celebrity feud fest, and you love it."
"The Iowa caucuses are no more predictive than a gasbag on an ethanol high swaying from a bridge in Madison County."
"A majority of Republican caucusgoers are white, native-born and believe that electing a demagogue will make American white again."
"I have a line in the last book about how to draw an invisible man, and it says, “I’m trying to be transparent.” I don’t actually want to be invisible, which is the dilemma of people of color, but I would like to be transparent, so people can see what my issues are, good and bad. I just try to be transparent and very present, and then see what happens."
"…All my flaws and quirks and neuroses, they fit just as well as the scarring that comes from racism or masculinity, and I don’t want to have to cut that off. People confuse privacy and secrecy way too much. I’m not saying it’s confessional, but it gives more texture to your work if you can figure out how not to close off those rooms."
"…here’s the thing about all the titles. It’s so great to not have to think about that. The title is a gesture to categorize it, reduce it, and frame it. In the sonnets I can carry an idea and know that I have to turn that idea…"
"…I think that poets can do anything. With a novel, we all know about plot and character and yes, there’s experimental and people can recognize that, but I think that there are rules. I don’t think of poetry that way…"
"I too, having lost faith in language, have placed my faith in language."
"If you don't love life you can't enjoy an oyster"
"Winston Churchill remains the implacable enemy of India’s independence He has never disguised his views Many members of his party differ with him ‘on the question of Indian Freedom, but Churchill’s imperialistic policy dominates “Mohamed Alt Jinnah has not in recent years given any proof of a devotion to the cause of India’s liberation from foreign rule Nor has the Muslim League over which he presides Landlords, who bulk large in the counsels of the League, stand to lose by the establishment of a new India, which would certainly alter the present land tenure to the disadvantage of landlords, Muslims as well as Hindus, and to the advantage of all peasants “What could be more natural, therefore, than that Churchill and Jiinnah should have been in correspondence, in recent months, over the fate of India ? They have quietly exchanged letters and messages It was shortly after the receipt of one such secret communication from Churchill that the Muslim League reconsidered its acceptance of the British Cabinet Misston’s long-term proposals and decided instead to boycott the coming Assembly which 1s to draw up a constitution for a new free India “The Cabinet Misston laboured hard and on the whole successfully to prepare the way for the transfer of political power from British to Indian hands Churchill and Jinnah are now attempting to undermine the effort”"
"Mrs. Cassan always went to fortunetellers. When none was available she cast the cards or séanced with ouija. She had had her future foretold so many times that in order to fulfill all the forecasts she would have to live ninety-seven more years and encounter and charm a war-strength regiment of tall, dark men."
"“Well,” said the chief in disgust, “there’s two people I don’t never argue with: one’s a woman and the other’s a damn fool. And you aint no woman!”"
"It had always been my belief that beauty was a modification of sex. Life sings a song of sex. Sex is the scream of life."
"If I could only have seen her when I was a young man! The contemplation of her beauty might have changed my whole life. Beauty can do that, can’t it?"
"Why do you stand there staring at me? You and I have nothing in common except our hatred of each other."
"“Oh, misery!” screamed the doctor. “Why do they have to fight so when there is nothing to fight about? They are as stupid as humans."
"He said Heaven reminded him more than anything else of an advertisement he had once read of Southern California."
"Fierce and beautiful hunters who, when they ease up on their vigilance find themselves converted into coats and collars."
"In the wake of Pearl Harbor, a single word favored above all others by Americans as best characterizing the Japanese people was "treacherous," and for the duration of the war the surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet remained the preeminent symbol of the enemy's inherent treachery. The attack also inspired a thirst for revenge among Americans that the Japanese, with their own racial blinders, had failed to anticipate. In one of his earliest presentations of the plan to attack Pearl Harbor, even Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who presumedly knew the American temperament firsthand from his years as a naval attache in Washington, expressed hope that shattering opening blow against the Pacific Fleet would render both the U.S. Navy and the American people "so dispirited that they will not be able to recover.""
"Even after they were checked at Midway and Guadalcanal in 1942, many Japanese remained convinced that the Anglo-American enemy was indeed psychologically incapable of recovering In actuality, the contrary was true, for the surprise attack provoked a rage bordering on the genocidal among Americans. Thus, Admiral William Halsey, soon to become commander of the South Pacific Force, vowed after Pearl Harbor that by the end of the war the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell, and rallied his men thereafter under such slogans as "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Jap." Or as the U.S. Marines put it in a well-known variation on Halsey's motto: "Remember Pearl Harbor- keep 'em dying.""
"Indeed, in wartime jargon, the notion of "good Japanese" came to take on an entirely different meaning than that of "good Germans," as Admiral William F. Halsey emphasized at a news conference early in 1944. "The only good Jap is a Jap who's been dead for six months," the commander of the U.S. South Pacific Force declared, and he did not mean just combatants. "When we get to Tokyo, where we're bound to get eventually," Halsey went on, "we'll have a little celebration where Tokyo was." Halsey was improvising on a popular wartime saying, "the only good Jap is a dead Jap," and his colleagues in the military often endorsed this sentiment in their own fashion."
"Among the Allied war leaders, Admiral Halsey was the most notorious for making outrageous and virulently racist remarks about the Japanese enemy in public. Many of his slogans and pronouncements bordered on advocacy of genocide. Although he came under criticism for his intemperate remarks, and was even accused of being drunk in public, Halsey was immensely popular among his men and naturally attracted good press coverage. His favorite phrase for the Japanese was "yellow bastards," and in general he found the color allusion irresistible."
"India is truly a mystery containing all that is the worthiest, most spiritual, and intellectual in humankind and the worst aspects of humankind one could ever hope to find including total lack of concern for others, extreme material poverty, and spiritual bankruptcy and fraud. India is the world in other words with everything in the world revealed both of the highest form and lowest denominator. I love India. I hate India. I cannot ever go to India without returned with strong feelings about it. My later writings would not be the same without my frequent stays in India and the influences that this country has had on my thoughts and feelings. If India did not exist, we would create it just as it is perfect in its imperfection."
"(Would you say that Native nations are, on the whole, gaining a larger role in American society in the last few generations?) NB: I would say that the last few generations have witnessed an incredible rise in the sovereign authority of Native nations in ways that we haven't seen in contemporary American history. It's difficult celebrating these subjects in a kind of simplified way, but if we can understand the rising tide of Indigenous sovereignty that has made Native nations self-governing, economically viable, even, like, attractive as tourist destinations, we can envision a kind of more inclusive and heterogeneous vision of America in which race relations are not mired in a kind of myopic, black-white binary."
"How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world's most exemplary democracy? This question haunts America, as it does other settler nations. Among historians, silence, rather than engagement, has been the most common response, together with a continued unwillingness to see America's diversity from the vantage point of those most impacted by the expansion of the United States."
"American democracy arose from the dispossession of American Indians. If history provides the common soil for a nation's growth and a window into its future, it is time to reimagine U.S. history outside the tropes of discovery that have bred exclusion and misunderstanding. Finding answers to the challenges of our time-racial strife, climate crisis, and domestic and global inequities, among others-will require new concepts, approaches, and commitments. It is time to put down the interpretive tools of the previous century and take up new ones."
"Encounter-rather than discovery-must structure America's origins story. For over five hundred years peoples have come from outside of North America to the homelands of Native peoples, whose subsequent transformations and survival provide one potential guide through the story of America."
"Identifying American history as a site of genocide complicates a fundamental premise of the American story. Indeed, histories of Native America provide the starkest contrast to the American ideal. Native American studies scholars often view the conquest of the Americas as an ongoing process marked by mass violence that connects diverse Native nations."
"American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development."
"The present wave of immigrants and their children are rapidly assimilating into an ever-vibrant American mainstream culture, and at a pace greater than the Europeans who came during the previous large wave"
"Going back to the earliest years of the Republic, we find that Black Americans, while being exploited as slaves and workers, and while being shunned socially into rural and urban ghettos, have nonetheless been embraced culturally. Few other groups, with the possible exception of the Jews of Europe, have contributed more to the culture of the group that dominated and excluded them, than black Americans—in music, dance, theatre, literature, sports and more generally in the style and vibrancy of its dominant culture, America is indelibly blackish. Trying to imagine America without blacks, is like trying to imagine Lake Erie without oxygen."
"...It is truly amazing that, for all this progress black Americans remain today almost as socially segregated as they were in the late sixties; that for all this cultural and political progress, combined with striking changes in the racial attitudes of white Americans, black Americans are still twice as unemployed as white Americans, that they continue to earn 65% of the median income of white Americans, exactly the same proportion that they earned in 1970, that the typical white household has 16 times the wealth of a black one, that one in 3 black youth are certain to spend part of their lives in prison, that the police of this nation still enter and treat black neighborhoods as if they are an occupying army and still feel empowered to cut down our black youth with impunity."
"Pessimism is a self-fulfilling malady."
"Praised across the humanities as a Renaissance scholar, Patterson has written globally influential books on slavery and its opposite pole, freedom. His works are profoundly interdisciplinary, mining comparative histories and insisting on the complex significance of culture."
"...Despite the critical acclaim for his fiction, the young scholar cooled to writing additional novels after a visit to , the legendary Barbados-born writer and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner. Patterson found Lamming living in a remote one-room apartment, a bed-sit, above a cottage in north London, and decided to stick with the regular paychecks of academia."
"Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing."
"An interviewer once asked him whether he had any advice for young writers starting out. "No," he answered, "if a writer is going to get anywhere, he doesn't listen to anybody.""
"The wilderness begins at the edge of my body, at the edge of my consciousness, and extends to the edge of the universe, and it is filled with menace."
"I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. [...] Never then or now have I been able to look at a cloudless sky at night and see beauty there."
"This is not a man who sits down to "write a poem"; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being. Thoreau said, "Be it life or death, what we crave is reality." So it is with Carruth. And even in hell, knowledge itself bestows a halo around the consciousness with, at moments, attains it."
"In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98th Meridian—where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn't—towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place—now that it is dead—had come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied."