Translators from the United States

"The warriors that fought for their country, and bled, Have sunk to their rest; the damp earth is their bed; No stone tells the place where their ashes repose, Nor points out the spot from the graves of their foes. They died in their glory, surrounded by fame, And Victory's loud trump their death did proclaim; They are dead; but they live in each Patriot's breast, And their names are engraven on honor's bright crest."

"Music is the universal language of mankind — poetry their universal pastime and delight."

"Stars of the summer night! Far in yon azure deeps, Hide, hide your golden light! She sleeps! My lady sleeps!"

"Dreams of the summer night! Tell her, her lover keeps Watch! while in slumbers light She sleeps."

"She floats upon the river of his thoughts."

"Never here, forever there, Where all parting, pain, and care, And death, and time shall disappear,— Forever there, but never here! The horologe of Eternity Sayeth this incessantly,— "Forever — never! Never — forever!""

"I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where."

"And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend."

"In the valley of the Pegnitz, where, across broad meadow-lands, Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremburg, the ancient, stands.Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song, Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that round them throng."

"Emigravit is the inscription on the tomb-stone where he lies; Dead he is not, but departed, — for the artist never dies."

"Where'er a noble deed is wrought, Where'er is spoken a noble thought, Our hearts in glad surprise To higher levels rise."

"St. Augustine! well hast thou said, That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame!"

"The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night."

"The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath, While underneath such leafy tents they keep The long, mysterious Exodus of Death."

"A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

"A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood."

"Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead."

"Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupation, That is known as the Children's Hour."

"I hear in the chamber above me The patter of little feet, The sound of a door that is opened, And voices soft and sweet."

"Build on, and make thy castles high and fair, Rising and reaching upward to the skies; Listen to voices in the upper air, Nor lose thy simple faith in mysteries."

"He speaketh not; and yet there lies A conversation in his eyes."

"In the long, sleepless watches of the night, A gentle face — the face of one long dead — Looks at me from the wall, where round its head The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light."

"Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending; Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse."

"There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid."

"O Bells of San Blas in vain Ye call back the Past again; The Past is deaf to your prayer! Out of the shadows of night The world rolls into light; It is daybreak everywhere."

"He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce."

"Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody."

"Books are sepulchres of thought."

"This is the place. Stand still, my steed,— Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been."

"The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark."

"The surest pledge of a deathless name Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken."

"He has singed the beard of the king of Spain."

"Look, then, into thine heart, and write!"

"I heard the trailing garments of the Night Sweep through her marble halls! I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light From the celestial walls!"

"There is a Reaper, whose name is Death, And, with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between."

"Oh, not in cruelty, not in wrath, The Reaper came that day; 'Twas an angel visited the green earth, And took the flowers away."

"The star of the unconquered will."

"Oh, fear not in a world like this, And thou shalt know erelong,— Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong."

"Spake full well, in language quaint and olden, One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine, When he called the flowers, so blue and golden, Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine."

"The hooded clouds, like friars, Tell their beads in drops of rain."

"Tell me not, in mournful numbers, "Life is but an empty dream!" For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem."

"Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul."

"Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Finds us further than to-day."

"Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave."

"Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, act in the living present! Heart within, and God o'erhead!"

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;"

"Footprints, that perhaps another, Travelling o'er life's solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again."

"Let us, then, be up and doing. With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait."

"Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate, Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours Weeping upon his bed has sate, He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers."

"Something the heart must have to cherish, Must love and joy and sorrow learn; Something with passion clasp, or perish And in itself to ashes burn."

"Ah! this beautiful world!" said Flemming, with a smile. "Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and Heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly; and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad."

"In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer."

"Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart."

"Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number."

"I know a maiden fair to see, Take care! She can both false and friendly be, Beware! Beware! Trust her not, She is fooling thee."

"Thus, seamed with many scars Bursting these prison bars, Up to its native stars My soul ascended! There from the flowing bowl Deep drinks the warrior's soul, Skoal! to the Northland! skoal! —Thus the tale ended."

"No one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate, But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own."

"Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary."

"I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls The burial-ground God's-Acre! It is just; It consecrates each grave within its walls, And breathes a benison o'er the sleeping dust."

"Standing, with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet, Womanhood and childhood fleet!"

"O thou child of many prayers! Life hath quicksands; life hath snares!"

"The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, A banner with the strange device, Excelsior!"

"In happy homes he saw the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright."

"Try not the Pass!" the old man said; "Dark lowers the tempest overhead."

"O stay," the maiden said, "and rest Thy weary head upon this breast!"

"Beware the pine tree's withered branch! Beware the awful avalanche!"

"A traveller, by the faithful hound, Half-buried in the snow was found."

"For Time will teach thee soon the truth, There are no birds in last year's nest!"

"The prayer of Ajax was for light."

"O suffering, sad humanity! O ye afflicted ones, who lie Steeped to the lips in misery, Longing, yet afraid to die, Patient, though sorely tried!"

"Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands."

"His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate'er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man."

"Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, Onward through life he goes; Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night's repose."

"It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughter, To bear him company."

""O father! I see a gleaming light. Oh say, what may it be?" But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he."

"And fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost the vessel swept Toward the reef of Norman's Woe."

"Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!"

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals and forts."

"I stood on the bridge at midnight, As the clocks were striking the hour, And the moon rose o'er the city, Behind the dark church-tower."

"The day is done, and the darkness Falls from the wings of Night, As a feather is wafted downward From an eagle in his flight."

"A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain."

"Come, read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day."

"Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time."

"Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start."

"And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away."

"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms."

"Alike were they free from Fear, that reigns with the tyrant, and envy, the vice of republics. Neither locks had they to their doors, nor bars to their windows; But their dwellings were open as day and the hearts of their owners; There the richest was poor, and the poorest lived in abundance."

"When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music."

"Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels."

"Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted; If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment; That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain."

"Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike."

"And as she looked around, she saw how Death the consoler, Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever."

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."

"Ah, how wonderful is the advent of spring! — the great annual miracle of the blossoming of Aaron's rod, repeated on myriads and myriads of branches! — the gentle progression and growth of herbs, flowers, trees, — gentle and yet irrepressible, — which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous and the perpetual exercise of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be."

"I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it. I stand in awe of my own opinion. The secret demerits of which we alone, perhaps, are conscious, are often more difficult to bear than those which have been publicly censured in us, and thus in some degree atoned for."

"Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think."

"Hold the fleet angel fast until he bless thee."

"All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time."

"Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best; And what seems but idle show Strengthens and supports the rest."

"In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the gods see everywhere."

"God sent his Singers upon earth With songs of sadness and of mirth, That they might touch the hearts of men, And bring them back to heaven again."

"But the great Master said, "I see No best in kind, but in degree; I gave a various gift to each, To charm, to strengthen, and to teach."

"O holy trust! O endless sense of rest! Like the beloved John To lay his head upon the Saviour's breast, And thus to journey on!"

"My soul is full of longing For the secret of the Sea, And the heart of the great ocean Sends a thrilling pulse through me."

"There is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb is there! There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, But has one vacant chair!"

"The air is full of farewells to the dying, And mournings for the dead."

"But oftentimes celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise."

"What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps."

"There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death."

"Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives whom we call dead."

"Build me straight, O worthy Master! Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel, That shall laugh at all disaster, And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!"

"For his heart was in his work, and the heart Giveth grace unto every Art."

"And see! she stirs! She starts,—she moves,—she seems to feel The thrill of life along her keel, And, spurning with her foot the ground, With one exulting, joyous bound, She leaps into the ocean's arms!"

"Sail forth into the sea of life, O gentle, loving, trusting wife, And safe from all adversity Upon the bosom of that sea Thy comings and thy goings be! For gentleness and love and trust Prevail o'er angry wave and gust; And in the wreck of noble lives Something immortal still survives."

"And in the wreck of noble lives Something immortal still survives."

"Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"

"Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee,—are all with thee!"

"Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations."

"Ah, the souls of those that die Are but sunbeams lifted higher."

"The grave itself is but a covered bridge, Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!"

"I think I have proved, by profound researches, The error of all those doctrines so vicious Of the old Areopagite Dyonisius, That are making such terrible work in the churches, By Michael the Stammerer sent from the East, And done into Latin by that Scottish beast, Erigena Johannes, who dares to maintain, In the face of the truth, the error infernal, That the universe is and must be eternal; At first laying down, as a fact fundamental, That nothing with God can be accidental; Then asserting that God before the creation Could not have existed, because it is plain That, had he existed, he would have created; Which is begging the question that should be debated, And moveth me less to anger than laughter. All nature, he holds, is a respiration Of the Spirit of God, who, in breathing hereafter Will inhale it into his bosom again, So that nothing but God alone will remain."

"Thus departed Hiawatha, Hiawatha the Beloved, In the glory of the sunset, In the purple mists of evening, To the regions of the home-wind, Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin, To the Islands of the Blessed, To the Kingdom of Ponemah, To the Land of the Hereafter!"

"Don Quixote thought he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry. Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions."

"A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child."

"Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work, rather than its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture."

"We often excuse our own want of philanthropy by giving the name of fanaticism to the more ardent zeal of others."

"Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, — but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite."

"As turning the logs will make a dull fire burn, so change of studies a dull brain."

"The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature, — were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature."

"Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be, — a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, "Providence"."

""Let us build such a church, that those who come after us shall take us for madmen," said the old canon of Seville, when the great cathedral was planned. Perhaps through every mind passes some such thought, when it first entertains the design of a great and seemingly impossible action, the end of which it dimly foresees. This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings."

"I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and short-comings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self-assertion of youth."

"Authors have a greater right than any copyright, though it is generally unacknowledged or disregarded. They have a right to the reader's civility. There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it, and to these the author has a claim. Yet many people think that when they buy a book they buy with it the right to abuse the author."

"Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple."

"When we reflect that all the aspects of Nature, all the emotions of the soul, and all the events of life, have been the subjects of poetry for hundreds and thousands of years, we can hardly wonder that there should be so many resemblances and coincidences of expression among poets, but rather that they are not more numerous and more striking."

"The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness, — the taste and stain from the lees of the vat."

"The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made."

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."

"If the great Captain of Plymouth is so very eager to wed me, Why does he not come himself, and take the trouble to woo me? If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning!"

"Singing the Hundredth Psalm, the grand old Puritan anthem."

"But as he warmed and glowed, in his simple and eloquent language, Quite forgetful of self, and full of the praise of his rival, Archly the maiden smiled, and, with eyes over-running with laughter, Said, in a tremulous voice, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?""

"God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting."

"Into a world unknown,—the corner-stone of a nation."

"It is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence."

"He is a little chimney and heated hot in a moment."

"Thinking the deed, and not the creed, Would help us in our utmost need."

"Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year."

"One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm For the country folk to be up and to arm."

"And yet, through the gloom and the light, The fate of a nation was riding that night."

"All things come round to him who will but wait."

"At all feasts where ale was strongest Sat the merry monarch longest, First to come and last to go."

"And suddenly through the drifting brume The blare of the horns began to ring."

"Stronger than steel is the sword of the Spirit; Swifter than arrows, the light of the truth; Greater than anger is love that subdueth."

"A town that boasts inhabitants like me Can have no lack of good society."

"His form was ponderous, and his step was slow; There never was so wise a man before; He seemed the incarnate "Well, I told you so!""

"Our ingress into the world Was naked and bare; Our progress through the world Is trouble and care; Our egress from the world Will be nobody knows where; But if we do well here We shall do well there; And I could tell you no more, Should I preach a whole year!"

"Moons waxed and waned, the lilacs bloomed and died, In the broad river ebbed and flowed the tide, Ships went to sea, and ships came home from sea, And the slow years sailed by and ceased to be."

"Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence."

"Let him not boast who puts his armor on As he who puts it off, the battle done. Study yourselves; and most of all note well Wherein kind Nature meant you to excel. Not every blossom ripens into fruit."

"And now, my classmates; ye remaining few That number not the half of those we knew, Ye, against whose familiar names not yet The fatal asterisk of death is set, Ye I salute!"

"The scholar and the world! The endless strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books; The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!"

"Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate."

"For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day."

"And dimly seen, a tangled mass Of Walls and woods of light and shade Stands beckoning up the Stelvio pass Varenna, with its white cascade. I ask myself, Is this a dream? Will it all vanish into air? Is there a land of such supreme And perfect beauty anywhere!"

": Much must he toil who serves the Immortal Gods."

": With useless endeavour Forever, forever, Is Sisyphus rolling His stone up the mountain!"

": [waking] I am alone. These faces in the mirrors Are but the shadows and phantoms of myself; They cannot help nor hinder. No one sees me, Save the all-seeing Gods... She lifts the lid. A dense mist rises from the chest and fills the room. Pandora falls senseless on the floor. Storm without. : Fever of the heart and brain, Sorrow, pestilence, and pain, Moans of anguish, maniac laughter, All the evils that hereafter Shall afflict and vex mankind, All into the air have risen From the chambers of their prison; Only Hope remains behind."

": Never by lapse of time The soul defaced by crime Into its former self returns again; For every guilty deed Holds in itself the seed Of retribution and undying pain.Never shall be the loss Restored, till Hath purified them with his heavenly fires; Then what was lost is won, And the new life begun, Kindled with nobler passions and desires."

"Turn, turn, my wheel! All things must change To something new, to something strange; Nothing that is can pause or stay; The moon will wax, the moon will wane, The mist and cloud will turn to rain, The rain to mist and cloud again, To-morrow be to-day."

"Thine was the prophet's vision, thine The exaltation, the divine Insanity of noble minds, That never falters nor abates, But labors and endures and waits, Till all that it foresees it finds Or what it can not find creates."

"Art is the child of Nature; yes, Her darling child, in whom we trace The features of the mother's face, Her aspect and her attitude, All her majestic loveliness Chastened and softened and subdued Into a more attractive grace, And with a human sense imbued. He is the greatest artist, then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who follows Nature."

"What land is this? Yon pretty town Is Delft, with all its wares displayed: The pride, the market-place, the crown And centre of the Potter's trade."

"She knew the life-long martyrdom, The weariness, the endless pain Of waiting for some one to come Who nevermore would come again."

"Three Silences there are: the first of speech, The second of desire, the third of thought; This is the lore a Spanish monk, distraught With dreams and visions, was the first to teach."

"The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart, When the full river of feeling overflows."

"Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest On this Field of the Grounded Arms, Where foes no more molest, Nor sentry’s shot alarms!"

"Ye have slept on the ground before, And started to your feet At the cannon’s sudden roar, Or the drum’s redoubling beat. But in this camp of Death No sound your slumber breaks; Here is no fevered breath, No wound that bleeds and aches."

"All is repose and peace, Untrampled lies the sod; The shouts of battle cease, It is the Truce of God! Rest, comrades, rest and sleep! The thoughts of men shall be As sentinels to keep Your rest from danger free. Your silent tents of green We deck with fragrant flowers; Yours has the suffering been, The memory shall be ours."

"Hospitality sitting with Gladness."

"There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery."

"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all."

"I would like to ask you if you have ever read what I consider the greatest of poems of the United States—that is, Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha ... And then through that poem you have descriptions of Indian life and Indian legends which to me are of inexpressible beauty; and I do not hesitate to say, as far as my reading has led me to judge, that that is a poem that deserves to live, and will live; and at this moment it is the finest poem of any length that has been produced by any writer of the United States."

"I wish I had known you, Longfellow, but truly I did, as a small reader with a book cracked wide, speaking aloud on the old wooden stairs of my grandparents' home, saying your words, between the daylight and the dark, swinging them like small lanterns which have brought me to this place by your bed on a late day in June, in your yellow house by the giant linden tree, still wondering at words and the length of a mattress."

"Another poem that appeals to all bold, courageous souls in "The Warning," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who, some critics aver, won more English hearts over to the anti-slavery cause than did the "Quaker Poet."

"There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see — I think that is enough to say about them..."

"Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved."

"Put up at the moment of greatest suffering a prayer, not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the sovereign spirit will accept thy ransom."

"Men disappoint me so, I disappoint myself so, yet courage, patience, shuffle the cards ..."

"It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods."

"How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone since they are content with so little."

"Might the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy be laid to heart! Might a sense of the true aims of life elevate the tone of politics and trade, till public and private honor become identical!"

"Let no one dare to call another mad who is not himself willing to rank in the same class for every perversion and fault of judgment. Let no one dare aid in punishing another as criminal who is not willing to suffer the penalty due to his own offenses."

"Were the destiny of woman thus exactly marked out, did she invariably retain the shelter of a parent’s or guardian’s roof till she married, did marriage give her a sure home and a protector, were she never liable to be made a widow, or, if so, sure of finding immediate protection from a brother or new husband, so that she might never be forced to stand alone one moment, and were her mind given for this world only, with no faculties capable of eternal growth and infinite improvement, we would still demand of her a far wider and more generous culture than is proposed by those who so anxiously define her sphere."

"Women are the best helpers of one another. Let them think; let them act; till they know what they need. But if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply-any. Let them be sea-captains if you will."

"The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work."

"Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering-pot and pruning-knife."

"Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow."

"It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores."

"Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions."

"There are two modes of criticism. One which … crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drouth. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood."

"It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant."

"We doubt not the destiny of our country — that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points."

"For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life."

"Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience; and casts light into the cavern through which he worked his cause up to the cheerful day."

"I accept the universe."

"I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own."

"I am 'too fiery' … yet I wish to be seen as I am, and would lose all rather than soften away anything."

"Your prudence, my wise friend, allows too little room for the mysterious whisperings of life."

"You are intellect, I am life!"

"To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it, seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph, mere stops."

"All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me."

"Who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field? The ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise his eyes from the ground ? No — but the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the ground. Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, his dreaming must not be out of proportion to his waking!"

"I never lived, that I remember, what you call a common natural day. All my days are touched by the supernatural, for I feel the pressure of hidden causes, and the presence, sometimes the communion, of unseen powers. It needs not that I should ask the clairvoyant whether "a spirit-world projects into ours." As to the specific evidence, I would not tarnish my mind by hasty reception. The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open. Yet it were sin, if indolence or coldness excluded what had a claim to enter; and I doubt whether, in the eyes of pure intelligence, an ill-grounded hasty rejection be not a greater sign of weakness than an ill-grounded and hasty faith."

"The better part of wisdom is a sublime prudence, a pure and patient truth that will receive nothing it is not sure it can permanently lay to heart. Of our study there should be in proportion two-thirds of rejection to one of acceptance. And, amid the manifold infatuations and illusions of this world of emotion, a being capable of clear intelligence can do no better service than to hold himself upright, avoid nonsense, and do what chores lie in his way, acknowledging every moment that primal truth, which no fact exhibits, nor, if pressed by too warm a hope, will even indicate. I think, indeed, it is part of our lesson to give a formal consent to what is farcical, and to pick up our living and our virtue amid what is so ridiculous, hardly deigning a smile, and certainly not vexed. The work is done through all, if not by every one."

"Thou art greatly wise, my friend, and ever respected by me, yet I find not in your theory or your scope, room enough for the lyric inspirations, or the mysterious whispers of life. To me it seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor."

"There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves."

"We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty. We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue. Yet, then and only then will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession."

"Let it not be said, wherever there is energy or creative genius, 'She has a masculine mind.' This by no means argues a willing want of generosity toward Woman. Man is as generous towards her as he knows how to be. Wherever she has herself arisen in national or private history, and nobly shone forth in any form of excellence, men have received her, not only willingly, but with triumph."

"The electrical, the magnetic element in Woman has not been fairly brought out at any period. Everything might be expected from it; she has far more of it than Man. This is commonly expressed by saying that her intuitions are more rapid and more correct. You will often see men of high intellect absolutely stupid in regard to the atmospheric changes, the fine invisible links which connect the forms of life around them, while common women, if pure and modest, so that a vulgar self do not overshadow the mental eye, will seize and delineate these with unerring discrimination. Women who combine this organization with creative genius are very commonly unhappy at present. They see too much to act in conformity with those around them, and their quick impulses seem folly to those who do not discern the motives. This is an usual effect of the apparition of genius, whether in Man or Woman, but is more frequent with regard to the latter, because a harmony, an obvious order and self-restraining decorum, is most expected from her. Then women of genius, even more than men, are likely to be enslaved by an impassioned sensibility. The world repels them more rudely, and they are of weaker bodily frame. Those who seem overladen with electricity frighten those around them."

"The especial genius of Woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency."

"It is with just that hope that we welcome everything that tends to strengthen the fibre and develop the nature on more sides. When the intellect and affections are in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep; inspiration will not be confounded with fancy."

"Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by the forms which flow from them. They make a rule; they say from observation what can and cannot be. In vain! Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and sets Hercules spinning; she enables women to bear immense burdens, cold, and frost; she enables the man, who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like a mother."

"What I mean by the Muse is that unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers, which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonition of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being. It may appear as prophecy or as poesy. … and should these faculties have free play, I believe they will open new, deeper and purer sources of joyous inspiration than have as yet refreshed the earth. Let us be wise, and not impede the soul. Let her work as she will. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white."

"Heroes have filled the zodiac of beneficent labors, and then given up their mortal part to the fire without a murmur. Sages and lawgivers have bent their whole nature to the search for truth, and thought themselves happy if they could buy, with the sacrifice of all temporal ease and pleasure, one seed for the future Eden. Poets and priests have strung the lyre with heart-strings, poured out their best blood upon the altar which, reare'd anew from age to age, shall at last sustain the flame which rises to highest heaven. What shall we say of those who, if not so directly, or so consciously, in connection with the central truth, yet, led and fashioned by a divine instinct, serve no less to develop and interpret the open secret of love passing into life, the divine energy creating for the purpose of happiness; — of the artist, whose hand, drawn by a preexistent harmony to a certain medium, moulds it to expressions of life more highly and completely organized than are seen elsewhere, and, by carrying out the intention of nature, reveals her meaning to those who are not yet sufficiently matured to divine it; of the philosopher, who listens steadily for causes, and, from those obvious, infers those yet unknown; of the historian, who, in faith that all events must have their reason and their aim, records them, and lays up archives from which the youth of prophets may be fed. The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose·"

"Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, despite impediments. But there should be encouragement, and a free genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort, fair play for each in its own kind."

"Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts. Woman the poem, man the poet; woman the heart, man the head; such divisions are only important when they are never to be transcended. If nature is never bound down, nor the voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough."

"What Woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded."

"Those who are not intimately and permanently linked with others, are thrown upon themselves; and, if they do not there find peace and incessant life, there is none to flatter them that they are not very poor, and very mean. A position which so constantly admonishes, may be of inestimable benefit. The person may gain, undistracted by other relationships, a closer communion with the one. Such a use is made of it by saints and sibyls."

"The position I early was enabled to take was one of self-reliance. And were all women as sure of their wants as I was, the result would be the same. But they are so overloaded with precepts and guardians who think that nothing is so much to be dreaded for a woman as originality of thought or character, that their minds are impeded with doubts till they lose their chance of fair, free proportions. The difficulty is to get them to the point from which they shall naturally develop self-respect, and learn self-help."

"Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation it would be only an experience to her as to man. It is a vulgar error that love, a love, to Woman is her whole existence; she also is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy."

"I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither are yet softened by the shadows of evening. Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed. Climbing the dusty hill, some fair effigies that once stood for symbols of human destiny have been broken; those I still have with me show defects in this broad light. Yet enough is left, even by experience, to point distinctly to the glories of that destiny; faint, but not to be mistaken streaks of the future day. I can say with the bard, "Though many have suffered shipwreck, still beat noble hearts." Always the soul says to us all, Cherish your best hopes as a faith, and abide by them in action. Such shall be the effectual fervent means to their fulfilment."

"Every relation, every gradation of nature is incalculably precious, but only to the soul which is poised upon itself, and to whom no loss, no change, can bring dull discord, for it is in harmony with the central soul. If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only becured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up. With a society it is the same."

"There is a Polish countess here, who likes me much. She has been very handsome, still is, in the style of the full-blown rose. She is a widow, very rich, one of the emancipated women, naturally vivacious, and with talent. This woman envies me; she says, "How happy you are; so free, so serene, so attractive, so self-possessed!" I say not a word, but I do not look on myself as particularly enviable. A little money would have made me much more so; a little money would have enabled me to come here long ago, and find those that belong to me, or at least try my experiments; then my health would never have sunk, nor the best years of my life been wasted in useless friction. Had I money now, — could I only remain, take a faithful servant, and live alone, and still see those I love when it is best, that would suit me. It seems to me, very soon I shall be calmed, and begin to enjoy."

"Safety is not to be secured, then, by the wisest foresight. I shall embark more composedly in our merchant-ship, praying fervently, indeed, that it may not be my lot to lose my boy at sea, either by unsolaced illness, or amid the howling waves; or, if so, that Ossoli, Angelo, and I may go together, and that the anguish may be brief."

"I am absurdly fearful, and various omens have combined to give me a dark feeling. I am become indeed a miserable coward, for the sake of Angelino. I fear heat and cold, fear the voyage, fear biting poverty. I hope I shall not be forced to be as brave for him, as I have been for myself, and that, if I succeed to rear him, he will be neither a weak nor a bad man. But I love him too much! In case of mishap, however, I shall perish with my husband and my child, and we may be transferred to some happier state."

"I feel perfectly willing to stay my threescore years and ten, if it be thought I need so much tuition from this planet; but it seems to me that my future upon earth will soon close. It may be terribly trying, but it will not be so very long, now. God will transplant the root, if he wills to rear it into fruit-bearing."

"I have a vague expectation of some crisis, — I know not what. But it has long seemed, that, in the year 1850, I should stand on a plateau in the ascent of life, where I should be allowed to pause for a while, and take more clear and commanding views than ever before. Yet my life proceeds as regularly as the fates of a Greek tragedy, and I can but accept the pages as they turn."

"I long so much to see you! Should anything hinder our meeting upon earth, think of your daughter, as one who always wished, at least, to do her duty, and who always cherished you, according as her mind opened to discover excellence. … I hope we shall be able to pass some time together yet, in this world. But, if God decrees otherwise, — here and HEREAFTER, — my dearest mother, "Your loving child, MARGARET.""

"Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life."

"My friends write to urge my return the talk of our country as the land of the future. It is so, but that spirit which made it all it is of value in my eyes, which gave me all hope with which I can sympathize for that future, is more alive here at present than in America. My country is at present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal. In Europe, amid the teachings of adversity, a nobler spirit is struggling — a spirit which cheers and animates mine. I hear earnest words of pure faith and love. I see deeds of brotherhood. This is what makes my America. I do not deeply distrust my country. She is not dead, but in my time she sleepeth, and the spirits of our fathers flame no more, but lies hid beneath the ashes. It will not be so long; bodies cannot live when the soul gets too overgrown with gluttony and falsehood."

"The shrine is vowed to freedom, but, my friend, Freedom is but a means to gain an end. Freedom should build the temple, but the shrine Be consecrate to thought still more divine. The human bliss which angel hopes foresaw Is liberty to comprehend the law. Give, then, thy book a larger scope and frame, Comprising means and end in Truth's great name."

"In times of old, as we are told, When men more child-like at the feet Of Jesus sat, than now, A chivalry was known more bold Than ours, and yet of stricter vow, Of worship more complete."

"Knights of the Rosy Cross, they bore Its weight within the heart, but wore Without, devotion's sign in glistening ruby bright; The gall and vinegar they drank alone, But to the world at large would only own The wine of faith, sparkling with rosy light."

"The pass-word now is lost To that initiation full and free; Daily we pay the cost Of our slow schooling for divine degree. We know no means to feed an undying lamp; Our lights go out in every wind or damp."

"Though deepest dark our efforts should enfold, Unwearied mine to find the vein of gold; Forget not oft to lift the hope on high; The rosy dawn again shall fill the sky.And by that lovely light, all truth-revealed, The cherished forms which sad distrust concealed, Transfigured, yet the same, will round us stand, The kindred angels of a faithful band; Ruby and ebon cross both cast aside, No lamp is needed, for the night has died."

"Be to the best thou knowest ever true, Is all the creed; Then, by thy talisman of rosy hue, Or fenced with thorns that wearing thou must bleed, Or gentle pledge of Love's prophetic view, The faithful steps it will securely lead.Happy are all who reach that shore, And bathe in heavenly day, Happiest are those who high the banner bore, To marshal others on the way; Or waited for them, fainting and way-worn, By burdens overborne."

"We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone, Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought, And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone — A higher charm than modern culture won, With all the wealth of metaphysic lore, Gifted to analyze, dissect explore."

"A many-colored light flows from our sun; Art, 'neath its beams a motley thread has spun; The prison modifies the perfect day; But thou hast known such mediums to shun, And cast once more on life a pure white ray. Absorbed in the creations of thy mind, Forgetting daily self, my truest friend I find."

"Mercury has cast aside The signs of intellectual pride, Freely offers thee the soul: Art thou noble to receive? Canst thou give or take the whole, Nobly promise and believe? Then thou wholly human art, A spotless, radiant, ruby heart, And the golden chain of love Has bound thee to the realm above."

"Guard thee from the power of evil; Who cannot trust, vows to the devil."

"On the boundless plain careering By an unseen compass steering, Wildly flying, reappearing, — With untamed fire their broad eyes glowing In every step a grand pride showing, Of no servile moment knowing, —Happy as the trees and flowers, In their instinct cradled hours, Happier in fuller powers, —See the wild herd nobly ranging, Nature varying, not changing, Lawful in their lawless ranging."

"Wouldst have the princely spirit bowed? Whisper only, speak not loud, Mark and leave him in the crowd.Thou need'st not spies nor jailers have; The free will serve thee like the slave, Coward shrinking from the brave."

"With equal sweetness the commissioned hours Shed light and dew upon both weeds and flowers. The weeds unthankful raise their vile heads high, Flaunting back insult to the gracious sky; While the dear flowers, wht fond humility, Uplift the eyelids of a starry eye In speechless homage, and, from grateful hearts, Perfume that homage all around imparts."

"The pencil moved prophetic: together now men read In the fair book of nature, and find the hope they need. The wreath woven by the river is by the seaside worn, And one of fate's best arrows to its due mark is borne."

"There are who separate the eternal light In forms of man and woman, day and night; They cannot bear that God be essence quite."

"Existence is as deep a verity: Without the dual, where is unity? And the "I am"" cannot forbear to be;But from its primal nature forced to frame Mysteries, destinies of various name, Is forced to give that it has taught to claim."

"And dost thou seek to find the one in two? Only upon the old can build the new; The symbol which you seek is found in you."

"There are to whom each symbol is a mask; The life of love is a mysterious task; They want no answer, for they would not ask."

"A single thought transfuses every form; The sunny day is changed into the storm, For light is dark, hard soft, and cold is warm.One presence fill and floods the whole serene; Nothing can be, nothing has ever been, Except the one truth that creates the scene."

"You ask a faith, — they are content with faith; You ask to have, — but they reply "IT hath." There is no end, there need be no path."

"The day wears heavily, — why, then, ignore it; Peace is the soul's desire, — such thoughts restore it; The truth thou art, — it needs not implore it."

"The Presence all thy fancies supersedes, All that is done which thou wouldst seek in deeds, The wealth obliterates all seeming needs."

"To me, our destinies seem flower and fruit Born of an ever-generating root..."

"I do not think we are deceived to grow, But that the crudest fancy, slightest show, Covers some separate truth that we may know.In the one Truth, each separate fact is true; Eternally in one I many view, And destinies through destiny pursue."

"This is my tendency; but can I say That this my thought leads the true, only way? I only know it constant leads, and I obey."

"I only know one prayer — "Give me the truth, Give me that colored whiteness, ancient youth, Complex and simple, seen in joy and ruth.Let me not by vain wishes bar my claim, Nor soothe my hunger by an empty name, Nor crucify the Son of man by hasty blame.But in the earth and fire, water and air, Live earnestly by turns without despair, Nor seek a home till home be every where!""

"Thoughts which come at a call Are no better than if they came not at all Neither flower nor fruit, Yielding no root For plant, shrub, or tree."

"I prize thy gentle heart, Free from ambition, falsehood, or art, And thy good mind, Daily refined, By pure desire To fan the heaven-seeking fire."

"Triune, shaping, restless power, Life-flow from life's natal hour, No music chords are in thy sound; By some thou'rt but a rattle found; Yet, without thy ceaseless motion, To ice would turn their dead devotion."

"Life-flow of my natal hour, I will not weary of thy power, Till in the changes of thy sound A chord's three parts distinct are found. I will faithful move with thee, God-ordered, self-fed energy, Nature in eternity."

"I am immortal! I know it! I feel it! Hope floods my heart with delight! Running on air mad with life dizzy, reeling, Upward I mount, — faith is sight, life is feeling, Hope is the day-star of might!"

"It was thy kiss, Love, that made me immortal."

"Come, let us mount on the wings of the morning, Flying for joy of the flight, Wild with all longing, now soaring, now staying, Mingling like day and dawn, swinging and swaying, Hung like a cloud in the light: I am immortal! I feel it! I feel it! Love bears me up, love is might!"

"Chance cannot touch me! Time cannot hush me! Fear, Hope, and Longing, at strife, Sink as I rise, on, on, upward forever, Gathering strength, gaining breath, — naught can sever Me from the Spirit of Life!"

"We will worship by impromptu symbols, till the religion is framed for all Humanity. The beauty grows around us daily, the trees are now all in blossom and some of the vines; there is a Crown Imperial just in perfection, to which I paid my evening worship by the light of the fire, which reached to us, and there are flashes of lightning too. But I do not like the lightning so well as once, having been in too great danger. Yet just now a noble flash falls upon my paper, it ought to have noble thoughts to illumine, instead of these little nothings, but indeed to-night I write only to say: thou dear, dear friend, and we must must meet soon."

"To feel that there is so quick a bound to intercourse, makes us prize the moment, but then also makes it so difficult to use. Yet this one thing I wish to say, where so many must be left unsaid. You tell me, that I may, probably never know you wholly. Indeed the obstacles of time and space may prevent my understanding the workings of character; many pages of my new book may be shut against me, better than to yourself. Perhaps? I believe in Ahnungen beyond anything."

"Be what you would seem to be."

"When your dreams tire, they go underground and out of kindness that's where they stay."

"When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it."

"She possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time."

"In American literature she will remain a remarkable biographic phenomenon, while the tragic death of this Lycidas of women, a most painful personal story of shipwreck, was intensified by so many melancholy incidents that whoever, long years hence, may read them, will wonder how the gods could have been so pitiless, and why the life of new happiness and larger intellectual achievement which was before her should so suddenly have ended upon that savage and inhospitable shore."

"Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century. … Though today almost forgotten, Margaret Fuller still probably holds more firsts than any other American woman who ever lived. As editor of the transcendentalist Dial, she was the first woman editor of an important intellectual magazine. She was the first woman to write a book about the West and such experiences as sleeping in a barroom, shooting rapids in an Indian canoe, and witnessing maltreatment of the red man by the white man. She was the first woman to break the taboo against the female sex in the Harvard College Library. As columnist for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, she was the first U.S. woman journalist and and the first professional literary critic of cither sex in the United States."

"I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked; for I was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics, and had tasted the sweets of solitude and stoicism, and I found something profane in the hours of amusing gossip into which she drew me..."

"She wore this circle of friends, when I first knew her, as a necklace of diamonds about her neck. They were so much to each other that Margaret seemed to represent them all, and to know her was to acquire a place with them. The confidences given her were their best, and she held them to them. She was an active, inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought, the nobleness in New England seemed at that moment related to her and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest."

"Coincidences, good and bad, contretemps, seals, ciphers, mottoes, omens, anniversaries, names, dreams, are all of a certain importance to her. Her letters are often dated on some marked anniversary of her own, or of her correspondent's calendar. She signalized saints' days, "All-Souls," and "All-Saints," by poems, which had for her a mystical value."

"She chose the Sistrum for her emblem, and had it carefully drawn with a view to its being engraved on a gem. And I know not how many verses and legends came recommended to her by this symbolism. Her dreams, of course, partook of this symmetry. The same dream returns to her periodically, annually, and punctual to its night. One dream she marks in her journal as repeated for the fourth time: "In C., I at last distinctly recognized the figure of the early vision, whom I found after I had left A., who led me, on the bridge, towards the city, glittering in sunset, but, midway, the bridge went under water. I have often seen in her face that it was she, but refused to believe it.""

"Feminist literary critics have shown how in the 19th century women writers began to acknowledge women as their muses and their role models. Margaret Fuller and Sarah Orne Jewett acknowledged their indebtedness to Madame de Staël, the author of Corinne...The list could be indefinitely extended to show the almost desperate search of writing women for authoritative female predecessors."

"It is more than fifty years since Margaret Fuller, standing, as she said, “in the sunny noon of life,” wrote a little book, which she launched on the current of thought and society. It was entitled “Women in the Nineteenth Century”; and as the truths it proclaimed and the reforms it advocated were far in advance of public acceptance, its appearance was the signal for an immediate widespread newspaper controversy, that raged with great violence. I was young then, and as I took the book from the hands of the bookseller, wondering what the contents of the thin little volume could be, to provoke so wordy a strife, I opened the first page. My attention was immediately arrested, and a train of thought started"

"Because if the anarchist-feminists' rejection of a belief in inherent differences between the sexes automatically barred their use of feminist arguments that relied on the reinterpretation of conventional feminine stereotypes in the interests of equality, they were forced to revert to a simpler polemical position. Deriving their analytic framework from the work of an earlier generation of feminists, particularly such singular rebels as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sarah Grimké, the anarchist women insisted that the humanity of women was all the justification their cause required. For them the issue was uncomplicated: "Woman's emancipation means freedom, liberty. ...pure and simple." And when the Individualist Marie Louise announced that what women needed was "Liberty to act Liberty to live, Liberty to feel that our own acquired emancipation and happiness are not soiled by the aid of jealous proxies," her words were strikingly similar to the appeals to a common humanity voiced earlier by the Grimké sisters and Margaret Fuller."

"Just before the forecastle sunk, the remaining sailors determined to leave. The steward, with whom the child had always been a great favorite, took it, almost by main force, and plunged with it into the sea; neither reached the shore alive. The Marquis Ossoli was soon afterwards washed away, but his wife remained in ignorance of his fate. The cook, who was the last person that reached the shore alive, said that the last words he heard her speak were: "I see nothing but death before me, — I shall never reach the shore." It was between two and three o'clock in the afternoon, and after lingering for about ten hours, exposed to the mountainous surf that swept over the vessel, with the contemplation of death constantly forced upon her mind, she was finally overwhelmed as the foremast fell."

"Only her presence can give you the meaning of the name Margaret Fuller."

""I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission — as Carlyle would have us — "Gad! we'd better!" — or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place."

"After having admired the women of Rome, say to yourself, ‘I too am beautiful!’ … In you I met a real person. I need not give you any other praise."

"The only woman to whom it has been given to touch what is decisive in the present world and to have a presentiment of the world of the future."

"Margaret had done her strenuous work under fire while her husband stood in daily peril of death and while she herself was cut off from all communication with her baby. Only after it was all over might Emerson even begin to measure the depth of the distress out of which she wrote him from Rome, “Let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.” In fact, we do not know whether the heart that beat with this healthful, even pulse ever did comprehend."

"If our imagination is challenged to picture what Margaret Fuller would have been like had she remained in Boston, it is positively staggered at trying to conceive what would have been the career of the Marchioness Ossoli in America. The wreck of the Elizabeth deprived the cultural history of this country of what would surely have been an exciting chapter."

"Her specter haunted all who knew her, and many who did not. Henry James, born in New York in 1843, stood beside his father on a Hudson River excursion boat and heard Washington Irving tell that Margaret Fuller had been drowned the day before. Even at the age of seven this small boy was resolved to be one on whom nothing is lost, and he knew, if nobody else did, that a heroine had gone to a heroic death."

"The ship struck at ten minutes after four A.M., and all hands, being mostly in their nightclothes, made haste to the forecastle, the water coming in at once. There they remained; the passengers in the forecastle, the crew above it, doing what they could. Every wave lifted the forecastle roof and washed over those within. The first man got ashore at nine; many from nine to noon. At flood-tide, about half past three o'clock, when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle, and Margaret sat with her back to the foremast, with her hands on her knees, her husband and child already drowned. A great wave came and washed her aft. The steward had just before taken her child and started for shore. Both were drowned."

"Fume l'encens, veille l'amour, Dans son lit bleu la vierge est morte; Couve le feu, tombe le jour, L'Ange, mes soeurs, frappe à la porte."

"Sonore immensité des mers de l’Harmonie, Où les rêves, vaisseaux pris d’un vaste frisson, Voguent vers l’inconnu, leur voilure infinie Claquant aven angoisse aux bourrasques du Son!"

"I believe Beauty is the condition of the perfect life, just as important as Virtue and Truth."

"In the whole period, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, the greatest American poet is Stuart Merrill."

"Oh no well I / been there before / and I ain't a comin back around / there no more / no I'm not"

"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through... the transitive nightfall of diamonds"

"When I was just a little young boy, Papa said "Son, you'll never get far, I'll tell you the reason if you want to know, 'cause child of mine, there isn't really very far to go.""

"Well, the first days are the hardest days, don't you worry anymore. When life looks like Easy Street there is danger at your door."

"It's the same story the crow told me, it's the only one he knows. Like the morning sun you come and like the wind you go."

"Ain't no time to hate, barely time to wait. Wo-oh, what I want to know, where does the time go?"

"In the timbers of Fennario, the wolves are running round. The winter was so hard and cold, froze ten feet 'neath the ground...I sat down to my supper, 'twas a bottle of red whisky. I said my prayers and went to bed, that's the last they saw of me..."

"Nothing's for certain, It could always go wrong, Come in when it's raining, Go on out when it's gone, We could have us a high time, Living the good life, Well I know"

"See here how everything leads up to this day. And it's just like any other day that's ever been. Sun going up and then, the sun, it going down. Shine through my window, and my friends they come around."

"Trouble ahead, Trouble behind, and you know that notion just crossed my mind"

"Trouble ahead. A lady in red. Take my advice. You'd be better off dead!"

"Trouble with you is The trouble with me Got two good eyes But you still don't see Come round the bend You know it's the end The fireman screams and The engine just gleams"

"There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night. And if you go, no one may follow. That path is for your steps alone."

"You who choose to lead must follow, But if you fall, you fall alone, If you should stand then who's to guide you? If I knew the way I would take you home"

"Let there be songs to fill the air."

"Lovers come and go, the river roll, roll, roll."

"Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be here."

"In the secret space of dreams, Where I dreaming lay amazed, When the secrets all are told, And the petals all unfold. When there was no dream of mine, You dreamed of me"

"Sometimes the light's all shining on me, Other times I can barely see, Lately it occurs to me, What a long strange trip it's been..."

"It seems like all this life was just a dream"

"Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world, but the heart has its beaches, its homeland, and thoughts of its own. Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings, but the heart has its seasons its evenings, and songs of its own"

"Sometimes we live no particular way but our own"

"I like your smile but I ain't your type, Don't shake the tree when the fruit ain't ripe"

"Once in a while, you get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if you look at it right."

"I won't slave for beggar's pay, likewise gold and jewels, but I would slave to learn the way, to sink your ship of fools."

"In another time's forgotten space, your eyes looked through your mother's face, Wildflower seed on the sand and stone, may the four winds blow you safely home. Roll away ... the dew"

"Crippled but free, I was blind all the time I was learning to see."

"Let my inspiration flow, in token lines suggesting rhythm, that will not forsake me, till my tale is told and done"

"The storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice, his job is to shed light, and not to master"

"Inspiration, move me brightly, light the song with sense and color, hold away despair"

"While you were gone, these spaces filled with darkness. The obvious was hidden. With nothing to believe in. The compass always points to Terrapin."

"Ain't nobody messin' with you but you"

"There are things you can replace, and others you cannot. The time has come to weigh those things, this space is getting hot."

"But never give your love, my friend, Unto a foolish heart"

"There are times when you get hit upon, Try hard but you cannot give. Other times you'd gladly part, With what you need to live"

"Don't waste the breath to save your face, When you have done your best, And even more is asked of you, Let fate decide the rest."

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."

"It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work."

"Image…that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough."

"Who brought this to pass? Who has brought the flaming imperial anger? Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums? Barbarous kings. A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn, A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom, Three hundred and sixty thousand, And sorrow, sorrow like rain."

"One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns."

"Poetry must be as well written as prose."

"It has been complained, with some justice, that I dump my note-books on the public."

"Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists."

"The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation."

"Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello.""

"Make it new!"

"Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

"But the one thing you shd. not do is suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."

"Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence"

"If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good."

"Both in Greece and in Provence the poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it."

"My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along."

"I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America and all America is an insane asylum."

"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."

"Not one man in a thousand can be aroused to an interest in economics until he definitely suffers from the effects of an evil system."

"It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse."

"If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order; And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions."

"And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean, for things they didn't know, But that time seems to be passing."

"Without character you will be unable to play on that instrument"

"The blossoms of the apricot blow from the east to the west, And I have tried to keep them from falling."

"With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting [...] with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall [...] no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly"

"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage"

"The ant's a centaur in his dragon world."

"Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place"

"How mean thy hates Fostered in falsity [...] Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity"

"To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered..."

"You damn sadist!" said mr. cummings, "you try to make people think."

"The temple is holy because it is not for sale."

"Pride, jealousy and possessiveness 3 pains of hell"

"And of man seeking good, doing evil."

"But the beauty is not the madness Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me. And I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere."

"Many errors, a little rightness."

"I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak. that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made."

"Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up, The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm, Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms Wart of the common-weal, Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things Darkness the defiler Twin evil of envy, Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things Passing the doors of temples defiling the grove of Paphos, neschek, the crawling evil, slime, the corrupter of all things, Poisoner of the fount, of all fountains, neschek, The serpent, evil against Nature's increase, Against beauty"

"A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures"

"All other sins are open, Usura alone not understood."

"And for one beautiful day there was peace."

"To be men not destroyers"

"A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him."

"The author's conviction on this day of the New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."

"Literature is news that STAYS news."

"Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."

"The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts."

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."

"AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN."

"Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."

"Hence "the serious artist," whom Pound describes in an early essay as the maintainer of the mental health of the state, has concerns identical with the serious philosopher, the serious ruler, the serious editor or publisher, the serious teacher. He keeps up values."

"His intelligence indeed has been a flowering of Western self‐awareness, with life‐bestowing and poisonous blossoms intermingled, as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest in it."

"Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound."

"Personally I admire several writers (Céline, for instance) who have gone over to the Fascists, and many others whose political outlook I strongly object to. But one has the right to expect ordinary decency of a poet. I never listened to Pound’s broadcasts, but I often read them in the B.B.C. Monitoring Reports, and they were intellectually and morally disgusting. Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences."

"I have been very excited by Ezra Pound's work with Chinese. People don't realize how much of Chinese culture is part of American culture. I mean, all those transcendentalists at the beginning of American writing."

"A musician once asked Ezra Pound if there was anywhere one could get all of poetry, in the sense that one could get all of music in Bach. Pound's response was that if a person would take the trouble really to learn Greek, he could get all of it, or nearly all of it, in Homer."

"Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few."

"Pound's ideas about Russian communism developed in two directions. First, he felt that there were basic similarities between the Russian and the fascist revolutions. Second, he felt a great deal of admiration for Lenin as a man of action in the mold of his hero, Mussolini (this was not an entirely accidental comparison, for the contemporary figure most admired by Mussolini was Lenin)."

"Pound's fascism-crazed mind"

"I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. My poems are acts of force and violence directed against the evil which murders us all. If you like, they are designed not just to overthrow the present State, economic system, and Church, but all prevailing systems of human collectivity altogether... I wish to speak to and for all those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption."

"Simone Weil was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth, or indeed of any other century. I have great sympathy for her, but sympathy is not necessarily congeniality. It would be easier to write of her if I liked what she had to say, which I strongly do not. …I think Simone Weil had both over- and under-equipped herself for the crisis which overwhelmed her — along, we forget, immersed in her tragedy, with all the rest of us. She was almost the perfectly typical passionate, revolutionary, intellectual woman — a frailer, even more highly strung Rosa Luxemburg. … She made up her own revolution out of her vitals, like a spider or silkworm. She could introject all the ill of the world into her own heart, but she could not project herself in sympathy to others. Her letters read like the more distraught signals of John of the Cross in the dark night."

"When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too."

"Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Satyricon, these are the world's major works of prose fiction."

"St. Francis is not only the most attractive of all the Christian saints, he is the most attractive of Christians, admired by Buddhists, atheists, completely secular, modern people, Communists, to whom the figure of Christ himself is at best unattractive. Partly this is due to the sentimentalization of the legend of his life and that of his companions in the early days of the order. Many people today who put his statue in their gardens know nothing about him except that he preached a sermon to the birds, wrote a hymn to the sun, and called the donkey his brother. These bits of information are important because they are signs of a revolution of the sensibility — which incidentally was a metaphysical revolution of which certainly St. Francis himself was quite unaware. They stand for a mystical and emotional immediate realization of the unity of being, a notion foreign, in fact antagonistic, to the main Judeo-Christian tradition. “I am that I am” — the God of Judaism is the only self-sufficient being. All the reality that we can know is contingent, created out of nothing, and hence of an inferior order of reality. Faced with the “utterly other,” the contingent soul can finally only respond with fear and trembling."

"The influence of Meister Eckhart is stronger today than it has been in hundreds of years. Eckhart met the problems of contingency and omnipotence, creator-and-creature-from-nothing by making God the only reality and the presence or imprint of God upon nothing, the source of reality in the creature. Reality in other words was a hierarchically structured participation of the creature in the creator. From the point of view of the creature this process could be reversed. If creatureliness is real, God becomes the Divine Nothing. God is not, as in scholasticism, the final subject of all predicates. He is being as unpredicable. The existence of the creature, in so far as it exists, is the existence of God, and the creature’s experience of God is therefore in the final analysis equally unpredicable. Neither can even be described; both can only be indicated. We can only point at reality, our own or God’s. The soul comes to the realization of God by knowledge, not as in the older Christian mysticism by love. Love is the garment of knowledge. The soul first trains itself by systematic unknowing until at last it confronts the only reality, the only knowledge, God manifest in itself. The soul can say nothing about this experience in the sense of defining it. It can only reveal it to others."

"The holiness of the real Is always there, accessible In total immanence. The nodes Of transcendence coagulate In you, the experiencer, And in the other, the lover."

"All night I lay awake beside you, Leaning on my elbow, watching your Sleeping face, that face whose purity Never ceases to astonish me."

"Towards the end of the night, as trucks rumbled In the streets, you stirred, cuddled to me, And spoke my name. Your voice was the voice Of a girl who had never known loss Of love, betrayal, mistrust, or lie."

"Now I know surely and forever, However much I have blotted our Waking love, its memory is still there. And I know the web, the net, The blind and crippled bird. For then, for One brief instant it was not blind, nor Trapped, not crippled. For one heart beat the Heart was free and moved itself. O love, I who am lost and damned with words, Whose words are a business and an art, I have no words. These words, this poem, this Is all confusion and ignorance. But I know that coached by your sweet heart, My heart beat one free beat and sent Through all my flesh the blood of truth."

"In the star-filled dark we cook Our macaroni and eat By lantern light. Stars cluster Around our table like fireflies."

"Late at night the horses stumble Around the camp and I awake. I lie on my elbow watching Your beautiful sleeping face Like a jewel in the moonlight. If you are lucky and the Nations let you, you will live Far into the twenty-first Century. I pick up the glass And watch the Great Nebula Of Andromeda swim like A phosphorescent amoeba Slowly around the Pole. Far Away in distant cities Fat-hearted men are planning To murder you while you sleep."

"What I try with my own stuff is to work the poem to a slow climax through a series of quiet painful dissonances."

"With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving."

"I have no interest in Kerouac whatsoever. I've done my stint for him. As far as I'm concerned, Kerouac is what Madison Avenue wants a rebel to be. That isn't my kind of rebel."

"The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech."

"You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America."

"You can’t become a saint by taking dope, stealing your friends’ typewriters, giving girls chancres, not supporting your wife and children, and then reading St. John of the Cross. All of that, when it’s happened before, has typified the collapse of civilization … and today the social fabric is falling apart so fast, it makes your head swim."

"There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay."

"No one was required to believe in the gods as Christians believe in their creeds. Socrates had always been scrupulous in observance of every accepted principle and practice of community life. However, from his questioning he had developed a civic and personal morality founded on reason rather than custom. He envisioned it as subject to continuous criticism and revaluation in terms of the ever-expanding freedom of morally autonomous but cooperating persons, who together made up a community whose characteristic aim was an organically growing depth, breadth, intensity of experience — experience finally of that ultimate reality characterized by Socrates as good, true and beautiful. The accusers were right. This is a new religion which bears scant resemblance to the old. Civic piety is founded on the recognition of ignorance and the nurture of the soil until it becomes capable of true knowledge — which is a state of being, a moral condition called freedom. The Greek city-state, not to speak of the tribal community, knew nothing of freedom in this sense, but only the liberty that distinguished the free man from the slave."

"The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring — as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold.""

"The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all."

"Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness.""

"Harvey, Galileo, Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment."

"Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism."

"The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later. As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself."

"As we turn over the pages of nineteenth century literature, we are constantly confronted with the question of alienation. Baudelaire, Marx, Kierkegaard, Chateaubriand, Cardinal Newman — it does not matter whether the voice comes from the Left or the Right; all are agreed in their rejection of the values of the prevailing ethic. Yet we never get a clear definition of alienation: what is man alienated from, and why? Perhaps it is precisely the democratic society, the growing affluence and education, that have revealed the natural state of man — much as the development of medicine has enabled greater accuracy of diagnosis, with the resultant tremendous increase in the record of certain diseases. Perhaps the discovery of human self-alienation was simply a statistical refinement made possible by the spread of the privileges of culture to the middle classes."

"Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters."

"Huckleberry Finn sets the tone and pattern for hundreds of American novels after it. No other civilization in history has been so totally rejected by its literary artists. Mark Twain is far more at odds with the values of his society than Stendhal, Baudelaire or Flaubert, and yet he is far more a part of it. In many ways he was the typical educated — self-educated, usually — American male of his day. He was also enormously successful, one of the most popular American writers who has ever lived. Significantly, his hack work was less popular than Huckleberry, and even his blackest, bitterest books sold very well — and still do. Perhaps the typical American male is secretly far less the optimist than he would have the world believe; but the lies he rejects and myths he believes are still those whose contradictions tortured Mark Twain."

"Prior to 1918 the word “communism” did not mean Left Social Democracy of the sort represented by the Russian Bolsheviks, a radical, revolutionary form of State socialism. Quite the contrary, it was used of those who wished in one way or another to abolish the State, who believed that socialism was not a matter of seizing power, but of doing away with power and returning society to an organic community of non-coercive human relations. They believed that this was what society was naturally, and that the State was only a morbid growth on the normal body of oeconomia, the housekeeping of the human family, grouped in voluntary association. Even the word “socialism” itself was originally applied to the free communist communities which were so common in America in the nineteenth century."

"People who believe in libertarian communism can be grouped roughly under three general theories, each with its old masters, theoreticians, leaders, organizations, and literature. First there are the anarchists in a rather limited variety: communist-anarchists, mutualists, anarcho-syndicalists, individual anarchists, and a few minor groups and combinations. Second, the members of intentional communities, usually but by no means always religious in inspiration. The words “communalism” and “communalist” seem to have died out and it would be good to appropriate them to this group, although the by now too confusing word “communist” actually fits them best of all. Third, there are the Left Marxists, who prior to 1918 had become a widespread movement challenging the Social Democratic Second International. It was to them the Bolsheviks appealed for support in the early days of their revolution. Lenin’s The State and Revolution is an authoritarian parody of their ideas. They in turn have called it “the greatest pre-election pamphlet ever written: ‘Elect us and we will wither away’.” Against them Lenin wrote Leftism: An Infantile Disorder. There is a story that, when the Communist International was formed, a delegate objected to the name. Referring to all these groups he said: “But there are already communists.” Lenin answered: “Nobody ever heard of them, and when we get through with them nobody ever will.” Today these ideas are more influential than they ever have been."

"As concentration and depersonalization increase in the dominant society, as the concentration of capital increases with the takeover of ever larger businesses by conglomerates and international corporations, as more and more local initiative is abandoned to the rule of the central State, and as computerization and automation narrow the role of human initiative in both labor and administration, life becomes ever more unreal, aimless, and empty of meaning for all but a tiny elite who still cling to the illusion they possess initiative. Action and reaction — thesis and antithesis — this state of affairs produces its opposite. All over the world we are witnessing an instinctive revolt against dehumanization."

"The contemporary world is being pulled apart by two contrary tendencies — one toward social death, one toward the birth of a new society. Many of the phenomena of the present crisis are ambivalent and can either mean death or birth depending on how the crisis is resolved. The crisis of a civilization is a mass phenomenon and moves onward without benefit of ideology. The demand for freedom, community, life significance, the attack on alienation, is largely inchoate and instinctive. In the libertarian revolutionary movement these objectives were ideological, confined to books, or realized with difficulty, usually only temporarily in small experimental communities, or in individual lives and tiny social circles. It has been said of the contemporary revolutionary wave that it is a revolution without theory, anti-ideological. But the theory, the ideology, already exists in a tradition as old as capitalism itself. Furthermore, just as individuals specially gifted have been able to live free lives in the interstices of an exploitative, competitive system, so in periods when the developing capitalist system has temporarily and locally broken down due to the drag of outworn forms there have existed brief revolutionary honeymoons in which freer communal organization has prevailed. Whenever the power structure falters or fails the general tendency is to replace it with free communism. This is almost a law of revolution. In every instance so far, either the old power structure, as in the Paris Commune or the Spanish Civil War, or a new one, as in the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, has suppressed these free revolutionary societies with wholesale terror and bloodshed."

"It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence."

"It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not."

"Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy."

"The characteristic paranoias of youth — the attribution of intention and duplicity to almost all human behavior. The young suffer terribly from the belief that the people they encounter are most of them up to something and that something has some relation to themselves. Actually, of course, most people just bobble along like apples in a stream. Usually it takes many years of experience to realize this."

"Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ."

"Any writer, reading over the typescript of a book for the last time before sending it off to the publisher, must wonder what all the effort was for. An autobiography is specially in need of justification to its author. It is a work of self-justification which itself needs justifying. Why have I written this book? Why have I written it the way I have? What does it mean to me? What do I hope it will mean to others? Each human being has at the final core of self a crystal from which the whole manifold of the personality develops, a secret molecular lattice which governs the unfolding of all the structures of the individuality, in time, in space, in memory, in action and contemplation. Asleep there were just these dreams and no others. Awake there were these actions only. Only these deeds came into being."

"Each of us is a specific individual, that one and no other, out of billions. I think each of us knows his own mystery with a knowing that precedes the origins of all knowledge. None of us ever gives it away. No one can. We envelop it with talk and hide it with deeds. Yet we always hope that somehow the others will know it is there, that a mystery in the other we cannot know will respond to a mystery in the self we cannot understand. The only full satisfaction life offers us is this sense of communion. We seek it constantly. Sometimes we find it. As we grow older we learn that it is never complete and sometimes it is entirely illusory."

"Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture — but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are."

"The classics of Socialist and Anarchist literature seem at mid-century to speak a foolish and naïve language to minds hardened by two generations of realpolitik. It was not just the sophisticates and the reformers who had no belief in the validity or endurance of the system. Everybody in what they used to call the master class, from the Pope to William Howard Taft, believed in his bones that the days of his kind were strictly numbered and found wanting. What happened instead of apocalypse and judgment was a long-drawn-out apocalypse of counterrevolution against the promise and potential of a humane civilization. It began with the world economic crisis of 1912, and the First and Second World Wars and the Bolshevik Revolution have been episodes, always increasing in violence and plain immorality, in the struggle of our civilization to suppress its own potential."

"The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section."

"In America we have nothing that takes the place of the gods and goddesses and heroes and demigods of the ancient world. There is nothing to connect us with the soil. We have no mythology. It has never been possible to construct one."

"I remember the first time I ever saw otter play and slide down a slippery bank into the water. Old Billy knew where they were and took me to them. We sat down silently behind some bushes on the bank of an Indiana stream and pretty soon out came a family of otter and climbed up on the bank and slid down the mud slide over and over again like little children. Nothing looks funnier than an otter having a good time, unless it’s a sea otter, which looks even more cherubic."

"You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience."

"All my life I have been attracted by Catholicism. But what attracted me was not its Christianity, but its paganism. The Scholastic Philosophers entertained me not because they were apologists for Jesus but because they were refinements of Aristotle. The liturgical life of the Church moved me because it echoes the most ancient responses to the turning of the year and the changing seasons, and the rhythms of animal and human life. For me the Sacraments transfigured the rites of passage, the physical facts of the human condition — birth, adolescence, sexual intercourse, vocation, sickness and death, communion, penance. Catholicism still provides a structure of acts, individual and at the same time communal, physical responses to life."

"The dumping of the mentally ill, full of these new psychiatric drugs, into the streets is a scandal. It’s been carried furthest in New York, where whole sections of the decayed Upper West Side are being filled with pensioners and psychotic patients on stelazine, lithium carbonate, and everything else under the sun. They can’t diagnose the patient, so they give him the whole psychiatric pharmacopoeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals."

"Ex-cons always say, "You never know what makes the wheels go round until you’ve done time in the joint." This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie."

"Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees."

"I was giving a reading at some university. Down in the front row of the auditorium was a young lady in a leather microskirt and a leather microbolero, tied with a leather bootlace, and nothing else whatever. I said, "I have an extremely wide repertory. What would you like — sex, revolution, or mysticism?" She looked up and said quietly, "What’s the difference?""

"See Life steadily, see it whole."

"I discovered Rexroth and I was really excited about him. It was the first contemporary poetry I read, and it was alive for me. It became a kind of model for how I wanted to write."

"Kenneth Rexroth, patriarch of the San Francisco Renaissance, called Muriel Rukeyser "the best poet of her exact generation.""

"I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong."

"They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed — I, too, am America."

"The night is beautiful, So are the faces of my people."

"I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

"I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

"The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead."

"Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) They hung my black young lover To a cross roads tree."

"Love is a naked shadow On a gnarled and naked tree."

"While over Alabama earth These words are gently spoken: Serve — and hate will die unborn. Love — and chains are broken."

"Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly."

"I was so sick last night I Didn't hardly know my mind. So sick last night I Didn't know my mind. I drunk some bad licker that Almost made me blind."

"I swear to the Lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me."

"Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it."

"If I were marooned on a desert island...I would miss...Jackie Ormes's cute drawings"

"Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be."

"Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed — Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above."

"O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe."

"I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek — And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak."

"For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay — Except the dream that's almost dead today."

"O, let America be America again — The land that never has been yet — And yet must be — the land where every man is free."

"Sure, call me any ugly name you choose — The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!"

"O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath — America will be!"

"Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers, The mountains and the endless plain — All, all the stretch of these great green states — And make America again!"

"You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word “Negro” is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow."

"For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly."

"My motto, As I live and learn, is: Dig And Be Dug In Return."

"When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left."

"Good evening, daddy I know you’ve heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred"

"Why should it be my loneliness, Why should it be my song, Why should it be my dream deferred overlong?"

"What happens to a dream deferred? Daddy, ain’t you heard?"

"What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over — like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.Or does it explode?"

"There’s a certain amount of traveling in a dream deferred."

"A certain amount of nothing in a dream deferred."

"Daddy, daddy, daddy, All I want is you. You can have me, baby — but my lovin’ days is through. A certain amount of impotence in a dream deferred."

"You talk like they don’t kick dreams around downtown."

"Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear."

"I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread."

"Dream within a dream, Our dream deferred. Good morning, daddy! Ain’t you heard?"

"The instructor said, Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you — Then, it will be true."

"It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you."

"Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records — Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races."

"You are white — yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That’s American. Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that’s true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me — although you’re older — and white — and somewhat more free."

"Langston Hughes' poem, "I've Known Rivers," became the rallying cry for black Americans to take pride in their color, the reverberations of that attitude reached the Africans in the then French and British colonies."

"[T]here have not been that many black artists that visible for black youth. There was Langston Hughes, but he was the only one and that was thirty-five to forty years ago. And men of the Negro Renaissance were not given to get outside of Harlem, really."

"I was always interested in fair play, probably from reading the works of Paul Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Charles Dickens as a child. I was always concerned about justice and injustice. To the extent that I could understand the issues, I was always on the side of the underdog. I'm on the same side today."

"Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts-and depressed that he has done so little with them…Hughes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro music. Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand-or sleight-of-hand-by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary-without the faintest notion of what it really means the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience. Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics: what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming. "Hey, pop!/Re-bop!/Mop!" conveys much more on Lenox Avenue than it does in this book, which is not the way it ought to be. Hughes is an American Negro poet and has no choice but to be acutely aware of it. He is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable."

"I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks."

"(Strictly from the African American experience, in your opinion what language would be our mother tongue?) TCB: The language of Langston Hughes, the language of Grandma, the language of "mama say." Mama say don't let cha mouth get you into what, etc. etc."

"(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things."

"About the time I was 17 and graduated from high school, I like to say that I ran away from home. I went to Harlem, and that was a most beautiful place where, fortunately for me, I came into, or rather, ran into, the hands of some wonderful people; people who formed an important part of the so-called Black Renaissance. They were people like Langston Hughes, [[w:Wallace Thurman|Wally Thurmond, Bud Fisher, all really wonderful writers."

"My cartoon character Bootsie has been a part of that struggle for 39 years and I believe, as Langston Hughes did, that satire and humor can often make dents where sawed-off billiard sticks can't."

"[T]he colored folks rolled in the aisles, laughin' and laughin'. And Brother Bootsie was right in there laughin' and gigglin' too... but he could never figure out why. And one night in the Harlem Moon over a few gins with gingerales Langston Hughes told Bootsie it was very simple. He was just laughin' to keep from cryin'."

"He came after me. At the time, I was not published at all, in '61, '62. I was not a popular Black poet, because some of the things I said ran very counter to a line that was the line in Black poetry at the time. And there was a lot of sexism involved too in those days-not that there isn't now, but it was particularly then...I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I think it had a lot to do with it, that he was closeted."

"We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, "You are not true.""

"Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings, And Nijinsky hadn't the words to make the laws For learning to loiter in air; he merely said, "I merely leap and pause.""

"Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best — unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle."

"What you hope for Is that at some point of the pointless journey, Indoors or out, and when you least expect it, Right in the middle of your stride, like that, So neatly that you never feel a thing, The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead And blow your brains out."

"What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you."

"In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means."

"A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only."

"Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder."

"When a poet is being a poet — that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing — he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself."

"It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody."

"Writing poetry, then, is an unsocial way of manufacturing a thoroughly social product. Because he must shield his poetry in its creation, the poet, more than other writers, will write without recognition. And because his product is not in great demand, he is likely to look on honors and distinctions with the feigned indifference of the wallflower. Yet of course he is pleased when recognition comes; for what better proof is there that for some people poetry is still a useful and necessary thing — like a shoe."

"Founded on rock and facing the night-fouled sea A beacon blinks at its own brilliance, Over and over with cutlass gaze Solving the Gordian waters ..."

"The beacon-blaze unsheathing turns The face of darkness pale And now with one grand chop gives clearance to Our human visions . . ."

"The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels."

"Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing..."

"The soul shrinks From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessed day, And cries, "Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.""

"The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body"

"The tall camels of the spirit Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the arid Sun. They are slow, proud, And move with a stilted stride To the land of sheer horizon..."

"O connoisseurs of thirst, Beasts of my soul who long to learn to drink Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst That shimmer on the brink Of absence; auras, lustres, And all shinings need to be shaped and borne."

"Wisely watch for the sight Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn, Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit's right Oasis, light incarnate."

"My dog lay dead five days without a grave In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine. I who had loved him while he kept alive Went only close enough to where he was To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell Twined with another odor heavier still And hear the flies' intolerable buzz."

"Well, I was ten and very much afraid. In my kind world the dead were out of range And I could not forgive the sad or strange In beast or man."

"Last night I saw the grass Slowly divide (it was the same scene But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green) And saw the dog emerging."

"I started in to cry and call his name, Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head. ... I dreamt the past was never past redeeming: But whether this was false or honest dreaming I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead."

"“A second issue was the attitude of Shi‘i clerics, government officials, and laypersons toward Hindus. The clerical attitude can be easily summarized. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi harbored an almost violent animosity toward Hindus, arguing that the Awadh government should take stern measures against them. He divided unbelievers into three kinds, those (harbi) against whom Muslims must make war, those (dhimmi) who have accepted Muslim rule and pay a poll-tax, and those (musta’min) whom their Muslim rulers have temporarily granted security of life. He insisted that Imami Shi‘ism accepted only Jews and Christians as protected minorities (dhimmis), and even they could only achieve this status if they observed the ordinances governing it. He differed with Sunni schools that considered Hindus a protected minority... He wrote that Muslims could only grant infidels personal security (aman) in a country they ruled for one year, lamenting that the government had long treated as grantees of personal security the Hindus of northern India, who openly followed their idolatrous religion, drinking wine, and sometimes even mating with Sayyid women. He complained that the irreligious Sunni Mughal rulers of India neither made war against the Hindus nor forced them to accept Islam. Legally, nonetheless, the lives and property of Hindus could be licitly taken by Muslims.” (p. 225)"

"A group of Israeli rabbis has issued a call for the Sharon government to cease its policy of cavalierly allowing the killing innocent civilians in the [Palestinian] Occupied Territories in the course of its military operations against radical groups. They say such actions are inconsistent with the essence of the Jewish religion. Too right! Judaism has given us so much that is noble in ethical religion, and what the Likud is doing is an insult to that long and glorious tradition. Likud's real roots lie not in the Bible but in Zionist Revisionism of the Jabotinsky sort, which is frankly a kind of fascism."

"The state of Israel is a project of Jewish nationalism that is as legitimate as any other national project. But Israel as a state is not perfect and cannot be above criticism in democratic societies, including practical criticism."

"The precise reason for Hitchens’ theft and publication of my private mail is that I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having “threatened to wipe Israel off the map.” I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel’s Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people. But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.” It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks."

"One of his charges is that I am accusing the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon of "dual loyalties." That is true, but not in the way Lake imagines. I believe that Doug Feith, for instance, has dual loyalties to the Israeli Likud Party and to the U. S. Republican Party. He thinks that their interests are completely congruent. And I also think that if he has to choose, he will put the interests of the Likud above the interests of the Republican Party."

"In his response, Foreign Minister Jack Straw said that September 11 had not come in response to any Western attack, and was itself in part responsible for the Iraq War. Straw seems unaware that according to the September 11 Commission report, al-Qaeda conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the US for supporting Ariel Sharon's iron fist policies toward the Palestinians. Bin Laden had wanted to move the operation up in response to Sharon's threatening visit to the Temple Mount, and again in response to the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, which left 4,000 persons homeless. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad argued in each case that the operation just was not ready. As for Straw's contention that September 11 caused the Iraq war, he should be reminded that Paul O'Neil reported that the very first Bush cabinet meeting he attended, in late January 2001, was "all about Iraq" and that the 9/11 Commission found no evidence for operational cooperation between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda."

"In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Gonzalez government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being "soft on Basques." To demonstrate the sincerity of its stance, the new government decided to have the entire twenty-three-person directorate of Herri Batasuna arrested."

"Without the music to shout over, few people bothered saying anything. (Remarking on a power cut while in a bar in the Dominican Republic)"

"... explanation for the human obsession with this common compound is ... offered ... in the 1920s, by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company of , in a booklet, "One Hundred and One Uses for Diamond Crystal Salt." This list of uses included keeping the colors bright on boiled vegetables; ; whipping cream rapidly; getting more heat out of boiled water; removing rust; cleaning bamboo furniture; sealing cracks; stiffening white ; removing spots on clothes; putting out grease fires; making candles dripless; keeping fresh; killing poison ivy; and treating , s, s, and s. Far more than 101 uses for salt are well known."

"In 1968 called the "the first music born in the age of instant communication." In June 1967 the Beatles had performed the first live international concert broadcast by satellite."

"The native s of the New York area and their residents, ', are believed to have first appeared about 10,000 B.C. The oldest Atlantic , in , has been carbon-dated to about 6950 B.C. give or take a hundred years—long before the arrival of the three thousand years ago. This marks the oldest evidence of humans ever found in the ."

"Most of the fish we commonly eat, most of the fish we know, could be gone in the next fifty years. This includes salmon, , , , and ."

"To a cod, ocean floors mean safety. That is why they were rendered commercially extinct by bottom draggers."

"If ever there was a fish made to endure, it is the Atlantic cod—the common fish. But it has among its predators man, an openmouthed species greedier than cod."

"In trade, it is an almost infallible natural law that a hungry low-end market, an eager dumping ground for the shoddiest work, is an irresistible market force."

"The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard-line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their own economy."

"All revolutions are to some degree about money."

"The ocean floor left behind is a desert. Any fish swimming in the vast area of these nets is caught. The only control is mesh size. Fish that are smaller than the holes in the net can escape. While mandating minimum mesh sizes has become a favorite tool of regulators, fisherman often point out that once the back wall of the cod end has a good crop of fish in it, few fish of any size can escape, regardless of how big the mesh. Millions of unwanted fish—undesirable species, fish that are undersized or over quota, even fish with a low market price that week—are tossed overboard, usually dead."

"The 200-mile limit was not seen in Canada, the United States, or anywhere else as a conservation measure, but rather as a protectionist measure for the national fisheries."

"But while the new, offshore all-Canadian fishery was prospering, the inshore fisherman found their catch dropping off. They suspected the reason was that the offshore draggers were taking so many cod that the fish did not have a chance to migrate in the shore to spawn. The inshore fishermen complained to the regulatory agency, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but the government had invested in offshore fishing, not inshore, and its political priority was to make its investment a success story."

"Canadian cod was not yet biologically extinct, but it was commercially extinct—so rare that it could no longer be considered commercially viable. Just three years short of the 500-year anniversary of the reports of Cabot’s men scooping up cod in baskets, it was over. Fishermen had caught them all."

"Commercially successful fish farms reduce operating costs by feeding pellets of pressed fish meal rather than wild bait fish. In the case of salmon they are also fit artificial coloring to give them the pink tin to the acquire in the wild from eating crustaceans. Gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops."

"Whatever steps are taken, one of the great obstacles to restoring cod stocks off of Newfoundland is an almost pathological collective denial of what has happened. Newfoundlanders seem prepared to believe anything other than that they have killed off nature’s bounty."

"Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us."

"Politics and nationalism often play far greater roles than conservation in the decision-making process."

"The Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 had extended the exclusive U.S. fishing zone to 200 miles offshore and set up as regulators regional fishery management councils dominated by fishing interests. Fishermen never had been good regulators, but they were virtually encouraged not to be by loan guarantees and other financial incentives that led to a massive growth in the U.S. fishing fleet. In 1994, when the National Marine Fisheries Service counted fish stocks, it concluded that the fleet was about twice as large as the fish stocks could sustain."

"As long as fisherman can catch a fish, they resist the idea that the species is in trouble. But with cod, they all recognize that there is a problem."

"It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done."

"Salt is certainly a worthy successor to Kurlansky's phenomenally successful Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. Readers with a passion for cookery will love it just as much, especially as Kurlansky once again litters his narrative with ancient and modern recipes garnered from all over the world."

"I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned campsites over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes."

"In the best painting as in authentic poetry one is aware of moral pressures exerted... choices are important, moral pressure exists to make right and wrong choices."

"I love what the poet Stanley Kunitz said about dreaming of “an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” That pretty much sums up what I most admire in a work of literature."

"I remember something Stanley Kunitz once told me. He said, "Poetry explores depths of thought and feeling that civilization requires for its survival.""

"Things come to me, they speak to me. Stanley Kunitz has had an enormous impact on my life. He once said that poetry is only half language, the other half is a quality of perception, a function of the imagination, a particular form of paying attention. For me, it's a stilling of the self, waiting for this language to speak to me before I utter it."

"Again, there are other things associated with these matters, all bearing more or less upon the same points. When God selected Joseph Smith to open up the last dispensation, which is called the dispensation of the fullness of times, the Father and the Son appeared to him, arrayed in glory, and the Father, addressing himself to Joseph, at the same time pointing to the Son, said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.""

": December 31, 1876"

": Journal of Discourses 18:325-6"

"When Jesus sent forth his servants formerly he sent them to preach this Gospel. When the Father and the Son and Moroni and others came to Joseph Smith, he had a priesthood conferred upon him which he conferred upon others for the purpose of manifesting the laws of life, the Gospel of the Son of God, by direct authority, that light and truth might be spread forth among all nations."

": March 2, 1879"

": Journal of Discourses 20:257"

"None of them was right, just as it was when the prophet Joseph asked the angel which of the sects was right that he might join it. The answer was that none of them are right. What, none of them? No. we will not stop to argue that question; the angel merely told him to join none of them that none of them were right."

": Journal of Discourses 20:167"

"[A]s a commencement the Lord appeared unto Joseph Smith, both the Father and the Son, the Father pointing to the Son said, "this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him" Here then, was a communication from the heavens made known unto man on the earth, and he at that time came into possession of a fact that no man knew in the world but he, and that is that God lived, for he had seen him, and that his Son Jesus Christ lived, for he also had seen him."

": January 4, 1880"

": Journal of Discourses 21:65"

"Poetry is a magic of pauses ... not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness."

"One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express."

"Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested ... liberate the imagination."

"You know I don't really understand much of my poetry myself. Of course, I was convinced I understood it when I wrote it !"

"I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest."

"I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things."

"For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind."

"I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it."

"What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it."

"Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence."

"I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins."

"A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself."

"Omissions are not accidents."

"A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes."

"Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people."

"War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized."

"He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist."

"I have learned more from Ezra Pound about writing than from anyone else."

"Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination"

"There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry."

"I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music."

"I look upon verse as an exercise in composition."

"Whatever it is.. poem.. play, story..it must hold attention."

"Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery."

"One may be pardoned, yes I know one may, for love for love, undying (Ephesians 6:24)"

"Blessed the man whose faith is different from possessiveness - of a kind not framed by 'things which do appear' ( Hebrews 11:3)"

"There is hate's crown beneath which all is death; there's love without which none is king."

"There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I conquered in myself what causes war"

"In Homer, existence is flawed; transcendence, conditional; ' the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual',"

"Tell me, Tell me where might there be a refuge for me from egocentricity and its propensity to bisect, mis-state, misunderstand and obliterate continuity?"

"O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!"

"You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man."

"Consume hostility; employ your weapon in this meeting-place of surging enmity! Insurgent feet shall not outrun multiplied flames, O Sun."

"Poetry I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle, Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine."

"If you demand on the other hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry."

"'Hebrew poetry is, prose with a sort of heightened consciousness' Ecstasy affords the occasion expediency, determines the form"

"that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder."

"My father used to say "Superior people never make long visits.""

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint."

"This is a strange fraternity — these sea lions and land lions, land unicorns and sea unicorns; the lion civilly rampant, tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador — the lion standing up against this screen of woven air which is the forest: the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity."

"So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ..."

"He's not out seeing a sight but the rock crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco brimming with inner light — that covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know as the hero."

"What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe."

"Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time."

"Some speak of things we know, as new; And you, of things unknown as things forgot."

"We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave."

"What of it? We call them brave perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come when no one will fight for anything and there's nothing of worth to save."

"Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister."

"A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague."

"Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal — the symbol of medicine."

"The problems is mastered — insupportably tiring when it was impending. Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom. The Gordian knot need not be cut."

"Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn, One can but say, "Farewell, good sense.""

"We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained."

"Marianne Moore is fundamental, and not only for having published poets of great intensity, such as Hart Crane, in the Dial, her splendid poetry review. It is difficult to define her contribution, so decisive it appears to me, but I am certain that she is our most original poetess, the one who has brought a brilliant precision to poetic language by means of a meticulous conservatism. Her extremely personalized style is at this moment influencing the young poets of the United States. She has succeeded in introducing a great variety of poetic motives, maintaining the ancestral, 'out-of-date' virtues of American culture-such as irony, a subtle sense of humor, understatement-while keeping herself at the same time within the creative vanguard of poetry in the English language."

"Although Le Guin tended to discount the distinction between dream-world and "real" world, she made a sharp distinction between the real world and the world of science fiction. When asked if there is really a difference between what we call reality and science fiction, she retorted decisively: "You bet you there is. You keep that firmly in mind. It's a fiction. You know what Marianne Moore said about imaginary gardens with real toads-sometimes there are real gardens with imaginary toads in them. But it's a mixture. Fiction writers write fiction, particularly in science fiction. People forget this and say they are describing reality or they are predicting reality. But the very most that a fiction writer can do is offer an option.""

"I created a "dream world" that I tried grounding absolutely and solidly in a real place, the Napa Valley, which I know stone by stone. Marianne Moore said real toads in imaginary gardens is what poetry is about. Well, what I did was create imaginary toads in a real garden. I tried working out in that book the world that I think I would like best to live in. Although this one will do."

"Until recently this female anger and this furious awareness of the Man's power over her were not available materials to the female poet, who tended to write of Love as the source of her suffering, and to view that victimization by Love as an almost inevitable fate. Or, like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, she kept sexuality at a measured and chiseled distance in her poems."

"I discovered that the woman poet most admired at the time (by men) was Marianne Moore, who was maidenly, elegant, intellectual, discreet."

"A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy."

"The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness. It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying."

"The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow."

"I take a wolf's rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears."

"I feel like Galway Kinnell has been a teacher, even though I have never met him. I love his work. I think that what he has is a beautiful balance between technique and music. He is such a poet. He's a poet's poet with the music"

"How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark."

"Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks."

"The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale."

"Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the nearest road, a spot so hard to reach that no one comes — a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies and nesting jays, a sign that there is still one piece of property that won't be owned."

"Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper — metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember."

"This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere — like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed."

"We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost."

"My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen."

"We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed we always chose to kill."We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim, And when we died, they laid us on her breast, But she refuses us — until we earn Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed."

"Teach us the names of what we have destroyed."

"This is not work but a kind of workmanship. First out of paper, then from the body. To provoke thought into form, molded according to a measure. I think of a tailor who is his own fabric."

"What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead."

"Audiences and critics acknowledge that a play or concerto gains force in great rendition. A good play may overcome bad staging. A great concerto may survive a poor soloist. But it is naturally assumed that a more accomplished performance intensifies the impact of the work. The play's text or concerto's score does not change, but the right actors and musicians help realize its full potential. Among contemporary literary critics, however, one never encounters this notion in regard to books and printing. To recognize the sensual contributions of the physical elements of a book is somehow assumed to demean the spiritual purity of the text. To notice the book itself smacks of philistinism, and to make distinctions based on paper, binding, and typography brings accusations of elitism or decadence."

"What does an instinctively popular poet do in contemporary America, where serious poetry is no longer a popular art? The public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence. Indeed, even if they were aware of his poetry, they would feel no need to approach it. Cut off from his proper audience, this poet feels little sympathy with the specialized minority readership that now sustains poetry either as a highly sophisticated verbal game or secular religion. His sensibility shows little similarity to theirs except for the common interest in poetry. And so the popular poet usually leads a marginal existence in literary life. His fellow poets look on him as an anomaly or an anachronism. Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy. Publishers see little prestige attached to printing his work. Critics, who have been trained to celebrate complexity, consider him an amiable simpleton."

"Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes."

"The time has probably come to admit that the notion of an avant-garde is no longer useful in discussing contemporary literature. How can there be an avant-garde without a mainstream? Avant-garde de quoi? one must ask. Establishment institutions — universities, museums, foundations, commercial galleries, even the state — have embraced the idea of experimental art for so long that the avant-garde is now a safely domesticated concept, just another traditional style."

"Like the intricately rational web of theology woven around the irrational mysteries of faith, the sober explanations of institutions for hoarding literary relics seem like elegant post-factum justifications for what is essentially a sense of sacred awe. An institution of learning seeks significant manuscripts because they possess qualities that scholarship cannot entirely reproduce — an authentic, holistic connection with the great writers of the past. It is not the intellectual content of the manuscript that is important but its material presence — ink spots, tobacco stains, pinworm holes, and foxing included."

"Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence."

"In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension."

"America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took — quite literally — the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic?"

"Raw artistic talent is abundant. What is truly rare are the cultural circumstances, attitudes, and institutions to develop and perfect it. Few American cities have ever managed to foster a vibrant literary milieu of international significance — perhaps only Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. American literature has most often been an affair of isolated genius or small coterie."

"In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?"

"To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer’s identity."

"Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones."

"Like gladiator games and pyramid building, opera has always been a gloriously money-losing proposition. It is the most extravagant of arts, requiring the constant support of kings, dictators, plutocrats, and town councils. Box-office success is no solution. San Francisco Opera loses money at every sold-out performance. Sane business practices simply don’t suffice. Composer Richard Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was the ideal operatic angel — very rich and certifiably insane. Mel Brooks’ shyster producer Max Bialystock need not have mounted Springtime for Hitler to score a surefire loss. Aida would have done just fine."

"I can’t think of better ways to learn than through pleasure and curiosity. I guess the reason these two qualities play so small a role in formal education is that they are so subjective and individual. Curiosity and delight can’t be institutionalized.Childhood and adolescence form our sensibilities. By the time I arrived in college, I had already developed a deep suspicion of all theories of art that did not originate in pleasure."

"The engines that have driven poetry's institutional success — the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university — have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view."

"Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around — not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake."

"Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture."

"Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author."

"Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind — journals that love poetry not wisely but too well."

"Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable."

"As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia."

"In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones."

"The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse."

"Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters."

"Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future."

"Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes."

"There is a special irony that this disappearance [of Catholic artists visibility despite Catholics constituting one-quarter of the US population] has occurred during a period when celebrating cultural diversity has become an explicit goal across the American arts. Some kinds of diversity are evidently more equal than others."

""Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world. They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin. Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil. Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things....Catholicism is also intrinsically communal, a notion that goes far beyond sitting at Mass with the local congregation, extending to a mystical sense of continuity between the living and the dead. Finally, there is a habit of spiritual self-scrutiny and moral examination of conscience" (10)."

""If Catholic literature has a central theme, it is the difficult journey of the sinner toward redemption" (14)."

""Sixty years ago Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture...They included established fiction writers--Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J.F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.)...also science fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr."...in American poetry...Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Ted and Daniel....There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio" (15-16)."

""Between 1945 and 1965 Catholic novelists and poets received 11 Pulitzer Prizes and 5 National Book Awards (6 NBAs if one counts O'Connor's posthumously published Complete Stories in 1972)" (18)."

""A New York leftist and an Alabama Pentecostal may not agree on much, but too often they share a dislike of Catholics" (22)."

""If the soul of Roman Catholicism is to be found in partisan politics, then it's probably time to shutter up the chapel" (24)."

"“If Catholic Christianity does not offer a vision of existence that transcends the election cycle, if our redemption is social and our resurrection economic, then it’s time render everything up to Caesar.”"

""The schism between Christianity and the arts has had two profound consequences, two vast impoverishments--one for the arts world, the other for the Church. First, for the arts world, the loss of a transcendent religious vision, a refined and rigorous sense of the sacred, the breaking and discarding of the two thousand years of Christian mythos, symbolism, and tradition has left contemporary American art spiritually diminished. The shallow novelty, the low-cost nihilism, and the vague and sentimental spiritual pretensions of so much contemporary art—in every medium—are the legacy of this schism, as well as the cynicism that pervades the arts world” (26)."

""The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car--functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable" (27)."

""The retreat of the nation's largest cultural minority from literary discourse does not make art healthier. Instead, it weakens the dialectic of cultural development. It makes American literature less diverse, less vital, and less representative" (28)."

"“Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi, have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas” (29)."

"“We necessarily bring the whole of our hairy and heavy humanity to worship” (29)."

"“Current Catholic worship often ignores the essential connection between truth and beauty, body and soul, at the center of the Catholic worldview. The Church requires that we be faithful, but must we also be deaf, dumb, and blind? I deserve to suffer for my sins, but must so much of that punishment take place in church?” (30)."

"“Two great poets are stronger than two thousand mediocrities” (31)."

""The Catholic writer really needs only three things to succeed: faith, hope and ingenuity" (31)."

""The Catholic writer understands the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge--intuitive, holistic, and experiential. Art is a form of knowing--distinct and legitimate--rooted in feeling and delight--that discovers, in the words of Jacques Maritain, "The splendor of the secrets of being radiating into intelligence." (34)."

"“The writer needs good works—good literary ones” (33)."

""It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition" (35)."

""When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation. When verse casts its particular spell, it becomes the most evocative form of language"."

""The second observation is that poetry is a universal human art. Despite post-modern theories of cultural relativism that assert there are no human universals, there exists a massive and compelling body of empirical data, collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists that demonstrates there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. Most of this poetry, of course, has been oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing. But the fact remains—and it is a demonstrable fact, not mere opinion—that every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry" (9-10)."

""Third and finally, poetry originated as a form of vocal music. It began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associated with civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic. (The earliest poetry almost certainly served a shamanistic function.) Most aboriginal cultures did not distinguish poetry from song because the arts were so interrelated as to be porous. Nor did the classical Greek or Chinese cultures two or three millennia ago differentiate poetry from song" (10)."

""In oral culture, there is no separation between the poet and the poem. The author is a performer who vocalizes the words. Creation and performance are inseparably linked. Without writing, a ‘text’ has no existence outside the auditory performance" (10)."

""Pop music provides useful perspective on Plato’s association of poetry with madness. There was something dangerously irrational in poetry that worried the philosopher. It wasn’t the semantic content but the visceral power of the sound and rhythm. Poetry compellingly communicates feelings that lie beyond or beneath rational discourse. The physicality of poetic speech separates it from the conceptual language of philosophy" (12)."

""But the amateur who reads poetry from love or curiosity does have at least one advantage over the trained specialist who reads it from professional obligation. Amateurs have not learned to shut off parts of their consciousness to focus on only the appropriate elements of a literary text. They respond to poems in the sloppy fullness of their humanity" (19)."

""Life is experienced holistically with sensations pouring in through every physical and mental organ of perception. Art exists embodied in physical elements—especially meticulously calibrated aspects of sight and sound—which scholarly explication can illuminate but never fully replace. However conceptually incoherent and subjectively emotional, the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive—than does critical commentary" (19)."

""Literature has many uses, not all of which occur in a classroom" (20)."

""The aim of poetry—in this primal and primary sense as enchantment—is to awaken us to a fuller sense of our own humanity in both its social and individual aspects. Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought" (22)."

""Until quite recently poetry was taught badly—at least according to current academic standards. Poetry was used to teach grammar, elocution, and rhetoric. It was employed to convey history, both secular and sacred, often to instill patriotic sentiment and religious morality. Poetry was chanted in chorus at female academies. It was copied to teach cursive handwriting and calligraphy. It was memorized by wayward schoolboys as punishment. It was recited by children at public events and family gatherings. Being able to write verse was considered a social grace in both domestic and public life. Going to school meant becoming well versed." (24)."

""For thousands of years, poetry was taught badly, and consequently it was immensely popular" (24)."

""Teachers and writers share a responsibility to create the next generation of readers. We need to create and cultivate in our classrooms a dialectic of intellect and intuition, of mental attention and sensory engagement. In poetry, intellectual-ity without physicality becomes dull and barren, just as intuition untethered by intellect quickly becomes sloppy and subjective. We need to augment methodology with magic." (36)."

"I personally regret the shift in literary study from reading primary texts to reading critical and theoretical texts. The major problem today among students is that they simply have not read enough literature. Consequently they do not have the necessary background to take a critical attitude towards literary theory. One needs to test every abstraction against experience."

"Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening."

"Poetry is not a branch of analytical philosophy. It is a primal, holistic kind of human communication. A poet needs innocence as much as knowledge, emotion as much as intelligence, vulnerability as much as rigor. A poet can become too smart for his or her own good and forget the childlike pleasures of sound and story, sense, and sensuality that poetry should provide. The challenge for a writer is to master the medium of poetry without losing that inner innocence."

"Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately — not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair."

"Poetry is an art form that demands heightened attention and retention. It both invites and rewards more intense involvement than we normally give to other kinds of speech. Poetic technique, therefore, is never esoteric but eminently practical. It serves at least two purposes. First, it announces that a poem differs from other kinds of speech, that it requires the audience's special attention. A poem begins by attracting our attention through its sound, shape, typography, syntax, texture, or tone. Second, the technique maintains the audience's involvement. All poetic form is a way of keeping the audience's attention beyond what ordinary language requires. Meter, for example, creates a gentle trance state in the auditor. Since poetry is more intense, condensed, and expressive than ordinary language, it needs these techniques to carry the burden of its message."

"I want a poetry that can learn as much from popular culture as from serious culture. A poetry that seeks the pleasure and emotionality of the popular arts without losing the precision, concentration, and depth that characterize high art. I want a literature that addresses a diverse audience distinguished for its intelligence, curiosity, and imagination rather than its professional credentials. I want a poetry that risks speaking to the fullness of our humanity, to our emotions as well as to our intellect, to our senses as well as our imagination and intuition. Finally I hope for a more sensual and physical art — closer to music, film, and painting than to philosophy or literary theory. Contemporary American literary culture has privileged the mind over the body. The soul has become embarrassed by the senses. Responding to poetry has become an exercise mainly in interpretation and analysis. Although poetry contains some of the most complex and sophisticated perceptions ever written down, it remains an essentially physical art tied to our senses of sound and sight. Yet, contemporary literary criticism consistently ignores the sheer sensuality of poetry and devotes its considerable energy to abstracting it into pure intellectualization. Intelligence is an irreplaceable element of poetry, but it needs to be vividly embodied in the physicality of language. We must — as artists, critics, and teachers — reclaim the essential sensuality of poetry. The art does not belong to apes or angels, but to us. We deserve art that speaks to us as complete human beings. Why settle for anything less?"

"I did not want my son remembered by uncontrolled howls of pain. My wife and I suffered more than I can express, but to make poems merely out of the agony would have been self-pitying and dishonest. My son had been my greatest joy. His birth had left me awe-struck and humble before life. He turned me from a son into a father — and allowed me to understand my own father clearly for the first time. If I mourned him, I also wanted to preserve the joyful mystery of his existence. The sorrow could not be adequately appreciated without also expressing the joy and wonder."

"Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there — which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned."

"The marketplace does only one thing — it puts a price on everything.The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us."

"The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society."

"What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility."

"I speak from ignorance. Who once learned much, but speaks from ignorance now."

"Where there's no stop and go a thought may wet your face, a breath arrest your stare."

"The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?"

"There are no rules. However, principles may be discerned in actual practice; for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines the poets have written."

"No aspect of a poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm."

"I am very interested in memorization which is the process of incorporating a poem, so, I would say the kind of poetry I write is the kind that emphasises the physical qualities of the words."

"I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it’s held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is a very good way to hold things together. It’s like 4:4 you know."

"Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem."

"All the mysteries of consciousness flower in the body."

"Poetry is a vocal art for me, not neccessarilyperformative, it might be reading to one self or recalling some lines by memory.The speaker bringing their own experience to it,changing it with their own sensibility."

"That physical tingle, that powerful audible experience(not with poets projecting their work to an audience) but more intimate, less planned than that."

"Craft is something you learn by studying models.When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson."

"It is the nature of poetry to emphasize that the physical sounds of words come from a particular body , one at a time, in a particular order."

"An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond....a good feeling about his art."

"Each work of art generate its own rules"

"There are no rules but uniformity can make it seem as though there are rules."

"A poem is free, and it shows its freedom by establishing its own principles."

"The voice recognizes movements and pause, similarity and difference, recognizes and understands it in a mental and physical process."

"The poet is a particular kind of expert."

"Part of making a poem is a process of day- dreaming."

"The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified."

"An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar."

"Every word is an abstraction or category, not a particular."

"The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle."

"Men don't begin to live fully until their backs are against the wall."

"That's what makes his story so impossible, David. Because he's told me the truth. (Alma to David on Hector)"

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read alot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?"

"I didn't say I was afraid of dying, I answered, I said that I was afraid to get on a plane. There is a difference. (David to Dr. Singh)"

"Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who'd wet his pants. I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom [...] How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist—a red as brilliant as fresh paint."

"April 1945. My unit was in Germany, and we were the ones who liberated Dachau. Thirty thousands breathing skeletons. You've seen the pictures, but the pictures don't tell you what it was like. You have to go there and smell it for yourself; you have to be there and touch it with your own hands. Human beings did it to human beings, and they did it with a clear conscience. That was the end of mankind [...] I'm sure you've read the stories about how some of them couldn't stop eating. The starved ones. They'd thought about food for so long, they couldn't help it. They ate until their stomachs burst, and they died. Hundreds of them."

"[G]overnments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line."

"For only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves."

"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."

"Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?"

"Turn again Whittington, Thrice Mayor of London"

"Little pig, little pig, let me come in. To which the pig answered: Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin. The wolf answered to that, Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow the house down."

"Well, he [the wolf] huffed, and he puffed, and he puffed, and he puffed and he puffed and huffed; but he could not get the house down."

"When the pig saw what he [the wolf] was about, he hung on a pot full of water, and made a blazing fire...and in fell the wolf..."

"Out the Old Woman jumped (of the window). And whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there...or taken up by a constable to the House of Correction for the vagrant she was I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her."

"Kind sir, if the truth I must tell, At the sign of Basin of Water I dwell."

"The sky is a-going to fall, I must go and tell the King."

"There once was upon a time a poor widow who had an only son Jack, and a cow called Milky-White."

"You don't know what these beans are, said the man [that Jack meets]. If you plant them overnight, by morning they grew right up to the sky."

"My man is an ogre and there is nothing he likes better than boys broiled on toast."

"Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive or be he dead I'll have his bones to grind my bread."

"But the Harp called out quite loud: Master! Master!"

"Fee, fi, fo, fum I smell the blood of some earthly one."

"Woe worth you, Molly Whuppie! never you come again Twice yet, carle, quoth she, I'll come to Spain."

"For out of every hole the rats came tumbling."

"...he must need wish in a hurry; and wish he did, that the black pudding may come off his nose."

"I am one of the endangered species: people who still write in meter and rime."

"(Carmine Crocco) From having once been a peaceful shepherd, [he] had become the terror of southern Italy. [...] The usual occupation of Crocco's band was robbery of the wealthy Italians of the vicinity, battles with the Italian troops, and the seizure and robbery of rich foreigners, for whose deliverance heavy ransoms were demanded. When a detachment of troops was sent against them, they showed considerable courage. As they knew the country well, with its hiding-places and points of vantage, it was not easy to capture them."

"The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think…Throughout the Mahabharata … Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war…. The Gita is a dishonest book …”"

"There is generally, therefore, an inverse ratio between the worship of goddesses and the granting of rights to human women. Nor are the goddesses by and large compassionate; they are generally a pretty bloodthirsty lot. Goddesses are not the solution."

"Aldous Huxley once said that an intellectual was someone who had found something more interesting than sex; in Indology, an intellectual need not make that choice at all."

"As the Hindu gods are "immortal" only in a very particular sense---for they are born and they die---they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details...and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however "archetypal" his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces."

"There was an Indian edition of most of my books, but it didn't make much of a splash."

"I've always felt like I haven't given anything back to India after all that she had given me, just soaked up all the wonderful stories and told them to Americans. Now at last I feel that I have contributed something to India, sharing with them stories that many of them know but many of them do not, and sharing an approach to the history of the Hindus that highlights things that are usually ignored."

"My mother had rubbings from the temple at Angkor Watt on the walls-that was the first thing that interested me. But it really began when I was in my teens, when my mother gave me a copy of A Passage to India. I really came into it from literature-only later did I turn to religious literature. I read Rumer Godden's Mooltiki, and other stories and poems of India (1957) and I read Kipling's Jungle Books. Then I read the Upanishads, and it was just so fascinating to me. I was raised by atheist and communist parents, so we had no religion whatsoever."

"That's what really interested me about India, the religious aspect-and the extravagance of it. There was so much of it; the temples had all these things crawling all over them. It was so alive and complicated compared to the relative austerity that I saw in Jewish and especially Protestant ceremonies. Not so much Catholic ceremonies, though. I always loved Catholicism for the same reason that I love Hinduism, they're so much alike: the kitsch, the colors, the incense, the saints and the pageantry."

"That was the other thing that drew me to India-the language. In high school my Latin teacher taught me Greek unofficially on Monday nights. I loved Greek; I loved the idea that there was another script. And then my Latin teacher told me there was a language that was even older and more interesting than Greek: Sanskrit. So everything started coming together-the art, the literature, the language."

"The culture-its excess-really suited me. I always liked Indian miniature painting much more than Renaissance painting. I didn't see what was so great about Rembrandt or Michelangelo. I liked paintings where there were 10,000 people in the scene and elephants and horses! I liked the carvings on Indian temples so much more than the simple architectural outlines."

"I was raised deeply imbued with my parents' atheism. The thought of really, seriously practicing any religion doesn't really work for me. But I feel at home in religious buildings and ceremonies. I still hang out a lot in Catholic churches in America. I like going to Catholic masses; I always go to Christmas and Easter. In India I always go to temples and to the pujas. But to be committed to the dogma of any religion-to be told what to believe-goes against my grain in some basic way."

"But when I do think about religious problems, I think in Hindu categories. When my father died, it was the first time something really terrible happened to me-and Christianity and Judaism were of absolutely no use to me. My Jewish and Christian friends would take me to synagogues and churches, and it didn't help at all. And then I started thinking about the myths I was translating at the time, which were about death-why there is death, how death came into the world, what happens when we die, speculations about karma and rebirth. The Hindu version of it made more sense to me than anything. It just seemed like Shiva as a god was more likely to be responsible for the world the way I knew it than the gods of Judaism and Christianity. Capricious, beautiful, violent, it just made more sense."

"So I agree with a lot of Hindu mythology and theology, and I think Hinduism describes life better than any other religion. It has a vision of the universe that corresponds more closely to the universe I've glimpsed in my 68 years on this planet than other visions of the universe."

"I feel at home in Hindu temples. I like how complicated they are. Being in a great Hindu temple is like being in a forest. You can wander around all day. People kind of leave you alone. When you wander around temples when there isn't a ceremony, there's a kind of peacefulness about them, and I recognize the scenes and the icons. That's Shiva doing this, that's Parvati doing that. Whereas when I go to the Vatican, I have to have someone explain to me what the Sistine Chapel is all about. So I'm at home in Hinduism in that sense, I know what it's all about."

"It's the religious aspects in which I feel most at home, in a way. No, I don't really feel at home in India anymore. I'm not physically comfortable in India most of the time-I like Chicago, I like snow. It's an irony that I should be an Indologist because I don't like hot climates. I don't like crowds. There are too many things about India that don't suit my physical makeup. And also, I hardly ever go to Bengal, so I don't have a language[ to speak. So I go as a visitor. I visit friends. To some extent, ironically, I'm more at home in India now because there are fabulous hotels with good food and people speaking English, it's like being in New York, but if I go to a village I can't talk to people. I don't know if I ever really was at home in India, but I love being there."

"India is still foreign to me, it's a familiar foreignness in some way, but it's still surprising. When you see a temple in India, you don't say, oh there's another temple, you say: "My God! How could anyone have had the imagination to do something so amazing!" It's never what you expect."

"I myself am by both temperament and training inclined to texts. I am neither an archaeologist nor an art historian; I am a Sanskritist, indeed a recovering Orientalist, of a generation that framed its study of Sanskrit with Latin and Greek rather than Urdu or Tamil. I’ve never dug anything up out of the ground or established the date of a sculpture. I’ve labored all my adult life in the paddy fields of Sanskrit, since I know ancient India best."

"The two sets of sources, textual and nontextual, reveal bits of history to us in different ways, like the lame man riding on the shoulders of the blind man. When it comes to history, you can’t trust anyone: The texts lie one way, while images and archeology mislead us in other ways. On the one hand, the gods did not fly around in big palaces, as the texts insist that they did, and we cannot know if women really did speak up as Gargi does in the Upanishads, or Draupadi in the Mahabharata."

"James Joyce, in his novel Finnegans Wake, in 1939, punned on the word “Hindoo” (as the British used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy and Doo-ley: “This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy."

"I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate... I do not blame Penguin Books, India. Other publishers have just quietly withdrawn other books without making the effort that Penguin made to save this book [The Hindus: An Alternative History]. Penguin, India, took this book on knowing that it would stir anger in the Hindutva ranks, and they defended it in the courts for four years, both as a civil and as a w:Lawsuitcriminal suit. They were finally defeated by the true villain of this piece – the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book."

"Doniger makes clear that no history focused on an imperial centre can capture the history of the Hindus here, any more than could such a state-focused story in the days before the arrival of the Muslims. But at the same time, the very structure of her presentation points also to the import-ance of the state as a locus for understanding how the history of the Hindus depends also on an engagement with broader currents of historical change extending outside India and linking this history to larger, worldwide processes."

"As a loosely applied, but strongly integrative, model, she proposes three roughly consecutive alliances: first the Vedic one of gods and humans as opposed to anti-gods and ogres, then the epic-Puranic one in which ascetics and renunciants seem to join over-ambitious ogres and anti-gods in threatening the gods, and finally the bhakti alliance that restores human dependence on the gods. From the point of view of the historian such a loose periodisation is satisfactory and convincing, especially in the first three fifths of the book, which deal with little else than the social and cultural history of religion. For the periods of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals and the British, however, when the author's focus partly shifts to political circumstances, her story is often episodic and sometimes, I think, a little naïve.."

"Long before Doniger’s book was pulped, an event which the secularists have eagerly highlighted, her book was replied to in detail by Vishal Agarwal... He showed that she was either wrong or unmistakably biased in hundreds of passages. For a lifelong tenant of a very prestigious Indology chair, it is shameful that she could deliver such substandard work. But the fact that her work was anything but scholarly, has been carefully hidden by the secularists, including in the present article. Yet the fact that such a bad book was universally applauded and even earmarked for an Indian award, tells you a lot about the power equation, with the anti-Hindu forces jubilantly on top."

"But because Doniger’s flippant approach serves the purpose of belittling and ridiculing Hinduism well, it is welcomed and highlighted by the Indian elite with its many-pronged attack on Hinduism... American Indologists including Wendy Doniger have always condoned religious discrimination on condition that Hindus are at the receiving end; they only protest when Hindus show initiative... Yet, they did have the arguments. A list of the numerous factual errors in Doniger's book has been compiled by Vishal Agarwal.. [he] has shown how her book's treatment of Hinduism is unconscientious and flippant to a degree that would never be accepted from a professor of her rank for more established religions. ... ... And she is not even a psychologist: elsewhere, her “alternative” (actually quite conformistic, only a bit more titillating) deconstruction of a religion would have been criticized as not based on any competence."

"It is a learned book: one cannot help being amazed by the amount and variety of source materials the author has at her command, many of which one would not find, or not expect to find, in a book on the history of Hinduism and its practitioners...She especially loves to illustrate ancient stories by interjecting comparisons with situations with which the audience is familiar: Doniger commands an unbelievably vast array of comparable material, often, though not always, from American popular culture.... Since Wendy Doniger openly disclaims any ambition to have written a conventional history ("my training is as a philologist, not a historian," p. 3), minor historical slips may be forgiven. Yet, there are some that deserve to be rectified."

"There are several issues that need more detailed and nuanced analysis rather than straight-jacketed formulations that we read in The Hindus. These concern terminologies and chronologies invoked, perfunctory manner in which class-caste struggles have been referred to — almost casually, complex inter-religious dialogue seen only in the context of Visnu's avataras, and looking at the tantras merely in terms of sex and political power. The work rarely rises above the level of tale telling... On the whole, this is neither a serious work for students of Indian history, nor for those with a critical eye on 'religious history' of India, nor indeed it is the real Alternative History of the 'Hindus'. The main actors of the narrative are not speaking themselves. They merely seem to be mouthing dialogues scripted by the privileged upper classes."

"An array of puns, asides and (sometimes off-key) jokes makes the book more bulky and somewhat anecdotal, but also entertaining to read."

"Doniger is fond of using pseudoscientific language to make her dismissive, negative and often poorly evidenced opinions on Hinduism sound weightier than they are—claiming for instance that Western feminists who embrace the Hindu Goddess are wrong because, when she compares India to Monotheistic, Male- God cultures, there is “in general an inverse ratio between the worship of goddesses and the granting of rights to human women.” Doniger does not produce any evidence to substantiate this sweeping statement which she has made...."

"Doniger’s school of scholarship universalizes Freudian methodologies and pathologies, and combines them with obscure Indic materials to weave wild theories about Indian culture. Indians advocating Freudian psychoanalysis have simply accepted and mimicked the Western theories without independently verified clinical and empirical data to establish their applicability in Indian contexts."

"“For Hinduism studies, the 21st century opens with an audacious tome by Wendy Doniger, ‘The Hindus An Alternative History’, Penguin/Viking 2009. This act of ‘courage’ or saahasa (also done with plenty of saa-haasa or tongue in cheek humor), ends up being closer to the ancient meaning of the word saahasa as used in Indian law codes, that is, an offence. After reading only a few pages of this book, I was reminded of something I did in my greener days. In late teens, when I had enough Sanskrit to read Valmiki, I went to my village educated mother, hoping to shock her, with my discovery that Valmiki’s Rama when in exile used to hunt the deer, roast the meat and offer it to Sita. My mother, though not pleased at this great news, watched me intently to study my intentions and quickly took away my sadistic pleasure by quoting a line from Tulsidas, of whose Ramayana, she was a daily reader. ‘Naanaa bhaanti Raam avataaraa/ Raamayana shata koti apaaraa’ (Rama has taken many kinds of avatars and Ramayanas are hundred crores in number). Today I marvel at the profound meaning this rural untutored woman had deciphered from the text of Tulsi that some of us are unable to grasp even though we may have spent a life time of reading and teaching heavy classical texts in Sanskrit and that too sitting on the cushion of a salary. She not only kept ‘her Rama’ intact, but showed no antagonism, distaste or horror of the ‘hunter Rama’ who was just another avatara, and not somebody who would threaten her faith, demolish the ‘myth of the holy cow’, endanger notions of Hindu vegetarianism, create doubts about the historicity of Rama, or give a boost to the tension between ‘Hindu attitude to violence in sacrifice and the Hindu ideal of nonviolence’ in life, a favorite theme in Doniger’s book. Myths or stories are many and in many versions. Do they mean to burden us with a past to be carried as a cross or are they meant to liberate us from ignorance and illusion that we ourselves create? Or, are myths to be interpreted as ‘narratives’ that aim to make a people, Hindus specially, uncomfortable, dislocated and even ashamed of their own heritage in order to make them yield to predatory cultures? These are some of the questions that come to mind while reading Doniger’s massive volume.”"

"[High-profile India-watching academics] “need to indulge America’s saviour complex if they need a share of the shrinking funding. The objective of the research needs to alleviate the misery of some victim and challenge a villain. And so, Doniger will provide evidence of how Puranic tales reinforce Brahmin hegemony, while Pollock will begin his essays on Ramayana with reference to Babri Masjid demolition, reminding readers that his paper has a political, not merely a theoretical, purpose. .. Being placed on a high pedestal is central to both strategies. Criticism also evokes a similar reaction in both sides – they quickly declare themselves as misunderstood heroes and martyrs, and stir up their legion of followers... Doniger and Pollock have inspired an army of activist-academicians who sign petitions to keep ‘dangerous’ Indian leaders and intellectuals out of American universities and even American soil”: Subramanian Swamy, Narendra Modi, and in similar controversies Rajiv Malhotra, the Dharma Civilization Foundation and others. Indeed, the Indological community’s touching (occasional) concern for freedom of speech is not erga omnes... No dissent is tolerated. If you agree with either side, you become rational scientists for them. If you disagree with them, you become fascists – or racists.... Being placed on a high pedestal is central to both strategies. Criticism also evokes a similar reaction in both sides – they quickly declare themselves as misunderstood heroes and martyrs, and stir up their legion of followers. ... “Likewise, Doniger and Pollock keep reminding their readers that Hinduism’s seductive ‘spirituality’ must at no point distract one from its communal and casteist truths.”...“Doniger and Pollock follow the Greek mythic pattern that establishes them as heroes who are in the ‘good fight’ against ‘fascist’ monsters.” ... Wendy Doniger’s conception of Hinduism deserves a more thorough treatment, much of which has already been pioneered by Rajiv Malhotra. But one general observation, which counts for the whole current of psycho-analytical “deconstruction” of Hinduism, is that the clumsy Freudian concepts she uses are simply not sufficient to understand Hindu explorations of consciousness and human nature... “Despite their deep knowledge of Hinduism, neither Elst nor Frawley, neither Doniger nor Pollock, believe in letting go and moving on, which is the hallmark of Hindu thought, often deemed as a feminine trait. Instead,... Doniger and Pollock keep reminding their readers that Hinduism’s seductive ‘spirituality’ must at no point distract one from its communal and casteist truths.”"

"She would be widely and enthusiastically agreed to be one of America's major scholars in the humanities, wide-ranging, unusually imaginative and poetic, capable of illuminating fundamental issues through a deft use of comparative analysis."

"It (1973) also happened to be the year when her first major work in early India's religious history, viz., Siva, the Erotic Ascetic was published and had instantly become a talking point for being a path-breaking work. I still prescribe it as the most essential reading to my postgraduate students at the University of Delhi, where I have been teaching a compulsory course on 'Evolution of Indian Religions' for the last nearly four decades. It was the beginning of series of extremely fruitful and provocative encounters with the formidable scholarship of Wendy Doniger."

"And of course, [Wendy Doniger's] translation, again is a ‘re’-translation” of others’ works” in which she has “merely added a fashionable(?) Freudian coating… Simple question: if ‘that’ much is wrong in just one story (and this is a small selection only!) — what about the rest of this book and her other translations?… It might have been better to have used the old translations and to have added her Freudian interpretation to them… In sum: The “translation” simply is UNREALIABLE... In view of all of this, I wonder indeed whether Doniger’s translation would have been accepted in the Harvard Oriental Series rather than in Penguin… And a little less hype would also do: ‘a landmark translation, the first authoritative translation in this century’ (cover); ‘to offer to more specialized scholars new interpretations of many difficult verses.’ (p. lxi) — I doubt it."

"The moon, appearing every month in several phases, is symbolic of the Jewish people whose history has assumed a variety of phases. Like the moon, they reappear aftern being eclipsed."

"The diversified authorship of the Prayerbook, embracing prophets and psalmists, legalists and poets, proclaims that all Israel has a share in its making."

"The very concept of repentance and atonement has made the Jewish outlook on life one of cheerfulness and confidence."

"In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole."

"A poem releases itself, it does it with cadence."

"I don't know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Sometimes it is more complete than other times."

"I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people... that shadow land between self and reality."

"The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. ... I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive."

"I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript."

"Full interview with Wallace Shawn"

"It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie."

"Lying is not a side effect of what RT does; it is the channel's heart."

"After nearly fifteen years of systematic destruction of public space, engineered by Putin, the normal ways by which regular people absorb information about the state of their country are gone. Only a person who had lost his livelihood or half his savings would have been able to report that the economy was failing."

"Public space frightens the Putin regime, which has worked hard, and effectively, to destroy it."

"Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently."

"Attacks by poisoning are possibly even more common in Russia than assassinations by gunfire. Most famously, Alexander Litvinenko, a secret-police whistle-blower, was killed by polonium in London, in 2006. Last week, British newspapers reported that a Russian businessman who dropped dead while jogging in a London suburb in 2012 had been killed by a rare plant poison. He had been a key witness in a money-laundering case that had originally been exposed by the Moscow accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death, in 2009, in a Russian jail."

"Like the Soviet regime before it, the Putin government spreads fear by destroying the illusion that one can protect oneself... People who work at two Moscow restaurants have warned me, separately, about the precise locations of listening devices at the eateries. The warnings came unbidden. The food at both places was, incidentally, not only very good but also apparently safe. That, along with the springtime sun, helps maintain the bizarre sense of normalcy that has a way of going hand in hand with the mortal danger that has become a fact of everyday life."

"[Following conciliatory messages from, among others, Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama after the result of the 2016 presidential election became known] However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a "normal" politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one."

"Putin's madman-on-the-world-stage shtick forced saner world leaders to devise strategies for minimizing the damage Russia can do. But now that Donald Trump has demonstrated that he will not only speak without thinking but also fire missiles without interrupting dessert, he has one-upped Putin."

"So Trump dropped the "mother of all bombs"—the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal—on Afghanistan, because, surely, the reason ISIS has not yet been defeated is that America has not used a big enough bomb."

"Trump has struck more countries with more fire power in a week than Putin often does in a year. Where Putin's unpredictable persona is a carefully cultivated one, Trump has given no evidence that his madman act is an act."

"[On Putin] He just keeps talking. And throwing numbers out there. Most of them wrong. It's meant to create the impression that he knows what he's talking about. But it's also just meant to drown you in meaningless stuff."

"[On Trump] He talks and you don’t even know where the punctuation marks fall. And the more you try to engage with those words, the less they mean."

"No powerful political actor had set out to destroy the American political system itself — until, that is, Trump won the Republican nomination. He was probably the first major party nominee who ran not for president but for autocrat. And he won."

"[In answer to the question: "You were born in Russia, spent your teenage years in America then moved back to Moscow as an adult. Do you feel more Russian or American?"] It doesn't really work that way. But when you have emigrated as often as I have, you learn the benefits of being an outsider. I am very comfortable not belonging. I find it extremely beneficial to my work as a journalist to be highly attuned to this culture yet at the same time hovering outside of it."

"[Referring to Trump's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Orlando at the end of February 2021] Trump recited a litany of lies about his own record and Biden's policies on immigration, and he ranted about the covid-19 pandemic: it sounded like he was against masking and against not masking, against social distancing and against not social distancing—or, simply, against everything Biden."

"[The Russian media] Coverage is repetitive not just from day to day, television channel to television channel; nearly identical stories appear in print and online media, too. According to a number of current and former employees at Russian news outlets, there is a simple explanation for this: at weekly meetings with Kremlin officials, editors of state-controlled media, including broadcasters and publishers, coördinate topics and talking points. Five days a week, a state-controlled consultancy issues a more detailed list of topics."

"In the United States, when we talk about mass violence and we are not talking about ideology, we usually talk about the easy availability of guns. Of course, access to guns matters. The easier it is, technically, to kill people, the more people will be killed."

"Yet, although no one pursues the politics of hating or othering children and arguing that they should be dead, school shootings proliferate, because one can imagine no terror greater than the terror inflicted on children and on their families. The essential precondition for mass violence, it seems, is not guns or hate but a culture of terror, a common imaginary that includes the possibility of a mass shooting."

"[On the actions of Israel in the Gaza Strip during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war] I'm not convinced that genocide is the right term. I think ethnic cleansing is the right term. But in any case, I think it's likely that crimes against humanity are being committed there. This is something I want to mention: This whole idea of crimes against humanity — like the idea of genocide — these are concepts that came out of World War II and the Holocaust. When we're thinking about whether a crime against humanity has been committed, or if a genocide has been committed, we're performing the act of comparing the Holocaust to current events. That's a foundational stone of our contemporary international legal system. So to ban that kind of comparison is to try to [throw] a wrench in the entire works of international humanitarian law, and I think Israel does that quite advisedly."

"Gessen is American, too. They (Gessen is transgender and non-binary and prefers the pronouns "they/them") were born in Russia, grew up in the US, and then lived in Russia again as a journalist, before returning to the US. This allows for a deep comparison between Trump and Vladimir Putin, on whom they have written a well-known book The Man Without a Face. The parallels are evident: Trump admires Putin. Indeed, he would like to be America's Putin."

"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"

"I believe haiku help us to see the world more clearly and haiku may be a useful therapy for all."

"Haiku can be the antidote against the kind of poetry dominated by egos and battling personalities."

"Small moments of natural wonder (as a youth), seemed to have prepared me to appreciate Japanese haiku."

"The arts have always transcended national boundaries as the haiku demonstrates."

"Haiku reading and writing can lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of life and our environment."

"the clock chimes, chimes, and stops but the river..."

"For William J. Higginson, haiku was a perfect rose, glistening with dew—and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, he was its foremost gardener."

"Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. ... The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit. An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country."

"It’s never been such a good time to be a crook. In what other country of laws does one enjoy so much freedom to defraud one’s government and fellow citizens without having to worry about cops showing at the door? Small-time crooks sooner or later end up in the slammer, but our big-time con artists, as we’ve come to learn, are now regarded as the untouchables, too well-heeled and powerful to lock up."

"Should some senator or congressman have a sudden attack of conscience and blurt something out, “dark money” brings them to their senses and reminds them that their job is to facilitate the transfer of public funds into the pockets of the few and to not ask too many questions."

"I sing of arms and of a man: his fate had made him fugitive; he was the first to journey from the coasts of Troy as far as Italy and the Lavinian shores."

"For other peoples will, I do not doubt, still cast their bronze to breathe with softer features, or draw out of the marble living lines, plead causes better, trace the ways of heaven with wands and tell the rising constellations; but yours will be the rulership of nations, remember Roman, these will be your arts: to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud."

"Euryalus, is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is it that each man's relentless longing becomes a god to him?"

"Crewmates, by now we are hardly strangers to evil and hardship. We've suffered worse. God will grant us an end to these sufferings also. ... Take heart once again and dispel your fears and depression. Maybe the day'll come when even this will be joy to remember."

"According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia."

"The precarization of academic labor contributes to the demolition of radical leftism."

"We know how to tell many believable lies, But also, when we want to, how to speak the plain truth."

"Whoever escapes marriage And women's harm, comes to deadly old age Without any son to support him."

"There's no way to get around the mind of Zeus."

"Rage: Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain."

"Human generations are like leaves in their seasons. The wind blows them to the ground, but the tree Sprouts new ones when spring comes again. Men too. Their generations come and go."

"It was glorious to see—if your heart were iron, And you could keep from grieving at all the pain."

"Ah, my friend, if you and I could only Get out of the war alive and then immortal and ageless all of our days, I would never again fight among the foremost Or send you into battle where men win glory. But as it is, death is everywhere In more shapes that we can count, And since no mortal is immune or can escape, Let's go forward, either to give glory To another man, or get glory from him."

"Don't try to cut any deals with me, Hector. Do lions make peace treaties with men? Do wolves and lambs agree to get along?"

"I have borne what no man Who has walked this earth has ever yet borne. I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son."

"And for yourself, may the gods grant you Your heart's desire, a husband and a home, And the blessing of a harmonious life. For nothing is greater or finer than this, When a man and woman live together With one heart and mind, bringing joy To their friends and grief to their foes."

"Don't try to sell me on death, Odysseus. I'd rather be a hired hand back up on earth, Slaving away for some poor dirt farmer, Than lord it over all these withered dead."

"Shimmering, iridescent, deathless Aphrodite."

"Some say an army on horseback, some say on foot, and some say ships are the most beautiful things on this black earth, but I say it is whatever you love."

"The moon has set, And the Pleiades. Midnight. The hour has gone by. I sleep alone."

"Your mission, Roman, is to rule the world. These will be your arts: to establish peace, To spare the humbled, and to conquer the proud."

"The Way is calm and wide, Not easy, not difficult. But small minds get lost. Hurrying, they fall behind.Clinging, they go too far, Sure to take a wrong turn. Just let it be! In the end, Nothing goes, nothing stays."

"Through me is the way to the city of woe. Through me is the way to sorrow eternal. Through me is the way to the lost below."

"Achilles—bring back the story, Goddess, of the formidable hero descended through Aeacus from thundering Jupiter, but denied His heaven, his deeds indeed famous through Homeric song, but with much more to celebrate."

"When the defiant boy, whose heart had never trembled, saw this girl at the head of her troop of companions he stiffened, and every bone in his body absorbed liquid fire."

"The person who casts off desires, who acts free from craving and lust, indifferent to "I, my, me," that person will arrive at peace."

"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. He saw the townlands and learned the minds of many distant men, and weathered many bitter nights and days in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only to save his life, to bring his shipmates home. But not by will nor valor could he save them, for their own recklessness destroyed them all— children and fools, they killed and feasted on the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun, and he who moves all day through the heaven took from their eyes the dawn of their return."

"Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous, that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss and crowded brave souls into the undergloom, leaving so many dead men—carrion for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done. Begin it when the two men first contending broke with one another—the Lord Marshal Agamémnon, Atreus' son, and Prince Akhilleus. Among the gods, who brought this quarrel on? The son of Zeus by Lêto. Agamémnon angered him, so he made a burning wind of plague rise in the army: rank and file sickened and died for the ill their chief had done in despising a man of prayer."

"I sing of warfare and a man at war. From the sea-coast of Troy in early days He came to Italy by destiny, To our Lavinian western shore, A fugitive, this captain, buffeted Cruelly on land as on the sea By blows from powers of the air—behind them Baleful Juno in her sleepless rage. And cruel losses were his lot in war, Till he could found a city and bring home His gods to Latium, land of the Latin race, The Alban lords, and the high walls of Rome. Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galled In her divine pride, and how sore at heart From her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him— A man apart, devoted to his mission— To undergo so many perilous days And enter on so many trials. Can anger Black as this prey on the minds of heaven?"

"Pages full of unlikely words, Handfuls of hot, bitter tears. They call the author a silly fool, For they know not what he means."

"When the unreal is taken for the real, then the real becomes unreal; Where non-existence is taken for existence, then existence becomes non-existence."

"[Shih-yin] was walking one day on the street, leaning on a cane, when he saw a lame Taoist in hemp sandals and tattered rags coming toward him, chanting this song:We all envy the immortals because they are free, But fame and fortune we cannot forget. Where are the ministers and generals of the past and the present? Under neglected graves overgrown with weeds.We all envy the immortals because they are free, But gold and silver we cannot forget. All our lives we save and hoard and wish for more, When suddenly our eyes are forever closed.We all envy the immortals because they are free, But our precious wives we cannot forget. They speak of love and constancy while we live, But marry again soon enough after we are dead.We all envy the immortals because they are free, But our sons and grandsons we cannot forget. Many there are, of doting parents, from ancient times— But how few of the sons are filial and obedient!After hearing this, Shih-yin went up to the Taoist and asked him, "What are you trying to say? All I can get is 'free' and 'forget.'" "That's all you need to get," the Taoist answered, laughing. "For if you are free, you'll forget, and if you forget, you'll be free. In other words, to forget is to be free and to be free is to forget. That's why I call my song 'Forget and be free.'""

"Tonight a pair of cooing doves under red bridal curtains, Tomorrow a heap of bleached bones like those of yesteryear. [...] One moment we grieve over a short-lived friend, The next we are ourselves overtaken by death."

"Careful as we may be with our sons, We cannot be certain they will not turn bandits and thieves. We would all bring up our daughters to be ladies, But who can say that they will not end up in courtesans' quarters?"

"What bustle and confusion, as one set of actors exits and another enters, Each taking the illusory for the real."

"[Pao-yu] says the strangest things for a mere child—for instance, that girls are made of water while men are made of clay and that's why he feels purified and invigorated in the presence of the one and contaminated and oppressed when in the presence of the other."

"[T]here suddenly appeared on the scene Precious Virtue. Though only a trifle older than Black Jade, she showed a tact and understanding far beyond her years. She was completely unspoiled, always ready to please and enter into the spirit of the occasion and always kind to the servants and handmaids. In contrast, Black Jade was inclined to haughtiness and held herself aloof. Thus in a short time, Precious Virtue won the hearts of all, and Black Jade could not help feeling a little jealous."

"Enduring as heaven and earth—no love however ancient can ever die; Timeless as light and shadow—no debt of breeze and moonlight can ever be repaid."

"Just at the point when we were at a loss as to what to use for the further development of our story, there came to the Yungkuofu a visitor from a poor family only remotely related to the Chias. This family, then, will serve our purpose."

"[The Taoist priest] said to Chia Jui, "This mirror was made by the Goddess of Disillusionment and is designed to cure diseases resulting from impure thoughts and self-destructive habits. It is intended for youths such as you. But do not look into the right side. Use only the reverse side of the mirror. I shall be back for it in three days and congratulate you on your recovery." He went away, refusing to accept any money. Chia Jui took the mirror and looked into the reverse side as the Taoist had directed. He threw it down in horror, for he saw a gruesome skeleton staring at him through its hollow eyes. He cursed the Taoist for playing such a crude joke upon him. Then he thought he would see what was on the right side. When he did so, he saw Phoenix standing there and beckoning to him. Chia Jui felt himself wafted into a mirror world, wherein he fulfilled his desire. He woke up from his trance and found the mirror lying wrong side up, revealing the horrible skeleton. He felt exhausted from the experience that the more deceptive side of the mirror gave him, but it was so delicious that he could not resist the temptation of looking into the right side again. Again he saw Phoenix beckoning to him and again he yielded to the temptation. This happened three or four times. When he was about to leave the mirror on his last visit, he was seized by two men and put in chains. "Just a moment, officers," Chia Jui pleaded. "Let me take my mirror with me." These were his last words."

"I'll have this on you for the rest of my life," the maid said, smiling and dangling the strand of hair before him. "Everything will be all right if all goes well between us. Otherwise I'll drag this out and show it to her." "Put it away carefully and don't ever let her find it," Chia Lien importuned. Then catching Patience off guard, he snatched the hair from her, saying, "It's safest out of your hands and destroyed." "Ungrateful brute," Patience said with a pretty pout. [...] In his tussle with Patience Chia Lien began to feel the fire of passion burn within him. Patience now looked prettier than ever with her pouted lips and her provocative scolding. He tried again to put his arms around her and make love to her, but Patience wriggled free and fled from the room. "You shameless little wanton," Chia Lien said. "You get one all excited and then run away." Standing outside the window, Patience retorted, "Who's trying to get you excited? You only think of your pleasure. What's going to happen to me when she finds out?" "Don't be afraid of her," Chia Lien said. "One of these days I'll get good and mad and give that jealous vinegar jar a good and proper beating and teach her who is master. She spies on me as if I were a thief. It's all right for her to talk and laugh with the men of the family, but she grows suspicious if she sees me so much as look at another woman."

"It is said that when the host is worthy, the guests become innumerable. Yu-tsun must consider you a worthy host. You ought to feel flattered." "Enough," Pao-yu said impatiently. "I do not pretend to be worthy and I don't care to associate with such worthy people as he." "Still the same Pao-yu," River Mist commented. "I should think you would be interested in the Examinations now that you are older and are ambitious to get a degree. Failing that, you ought to associate with officials, so as to learn something of the official world and acquire some friends to help you in the future. You will get nowhere if you spend your life among us."

"[Black Jade], I never dared to speak the secrets of my heart to you. I'll be bold today and I care not if I die as a consequence. I am also sick because I am constantly thinking of you. I dare not tell anyone. I won't be well until you are well again. I cannot forget you even in my dreams."

"[Black Jade] had her lamp relit and began to compose a series of quatrains, writing them directly on the handkerchiefs that Pao-yu had sent. After writing three stanzas, she began to feel exhausted and feverish. Going to her mirror, she found her cheeks flushed as if they were afire. She thought nothing of it, but from that moment on, her illness entered a more critical stage."

"[...] Pao-yu was given even more freedom than before. He spent most of his time playing the willing slave to the young ladies and his favored maids. Occasionally Pervading Fragrance or Precious Virtue would remonstrate with him and advise him to give some thought to his studies and his future career, but such advice only irritated him and brought the retort that he was surprised to see in them the same worldliness that he only associated with the more vulgar sex. Black Jade, alone, never gave him occasion for such remarks."

"As [Phoenix] drew near her room, she heard a woman's voice saying, "It will be easier for us when that monster of yours dies." "There will be another one, and she will be the same," answered Chia Lien's voice. "You can make Patience your wife," the woman said. "She will be easier to manage." "She won't even let me touch Patience," Chia Lien said. "And Patience doesn't dare complain, though she doesn't like her vigilance either. I wonder what I have done to deserve such a wife." Phoenix shook with rage. Thinking that Patience must have complained behind her back, she turned to her and slapped her face. She then burst into the room, seized Pao-er's wife and struck her repeatedly. Fearing that Chia Lien would bolt from the room, she planted herself at the door while she denounced the woman. "Prostitute!" she cried, "you seduce your mistress's husband and then plot to murder her! And you," she turned to Patience, "you prostitutes are all in conspiracy against me, though you pretend to be on my side." She struck Patience again. Patience was outraged. She cried, "You two—is it not enough for you to do this shameful thing without dragging me in?" She also made for Pao-er's wife. Chia Lien, who had until now stood helplessly watching Phoenix beat Pao-er's wife, took the opportunity to hide his own embarrassment by beating Patience. "Who are you to raise your hand against her?" he said to the maid. Patience retreated and said, weeping, "But why did you drag me into it?" Phoenix's anger mounted when she saw that Patience was afraid of Chia Lien and commanded her to ignore him and beat Pao-er's wife. The maid, outraged and helpless, ran out of the room, crying and threatening to kill herself. Phoenix now threw herself at Chia Lien, crying that he might as well kill her then and there since he wanted to get rid of her. Chia Lien grew desperate. He seized a sword from the wall and said he would gladly oblige if she insisted. Yu-shih and others arrived on the scene. "What is the matter now?" she asked. "Everything was going well a moment ago." Emboldened by the presence of the newcomers, Chia Lien became more menacing. Phoenix, on the other hand, quieted herself and left the scene to seek the protection of the Matriarch. She threw herself sobbing into the Matriarch's arms and said, "Save me, Lao Tai-tai. Lien Er-yeh wants to kill me.""

"[Pao-yu] could not see why beautiful maidens should marry and become slaves of men who would take them for granted, when they could just as well remain carefree and do nothing but play games and write verses."

"Hsueh Pan was a living example [of the] common saying, "To covet the land of Shu after grabbing the region of Lung." After having gratified his passion for Cassia, he began to turn his attention to her maid Cherry, who was by no means unattractive. The maid was willing enough but, knowing her mistress well, was afraid to encourage him. [...] Later at bedtime, Cassia made a pretense of not caring where he spent the night. "Go where your heart is," she said to him with a playful push. "I don't want to see you starve your heart out." [...] To show his gratitude, Hsueh Pan performed his conjugal duty to the best of his ability that night."

"What follows the way of Heaven prospers and what goes against it perishes."

""You need not think of [Black Jade] any more, for she died a few days ago while you were unconscious!" Pao-yu sat up and cried, "Is it true?" "Of course it is true," Precious Virtue said. "Do you think I would say such a terrible thing of anyone if it were not? [...]" Pao-yu cried unrestrainedly until he fell back, exhausted and unconscious."

"The death of Black Jade coincided with the wedding hour of Pao-yu and Precious Virtue. Shortly after Snow Duck was taken to the wedding chambers, Black Jade had regained consciousness. During this lucid moment, which was not unlike the afterglow of the setting sun, she took Purple Cuckoo's hand and said to her with an effort, "My hour is here. You have served me for many years, and I had hoped that we should be together the rest of our lives... but I am afraid..." The effort exhausted her and she fell back, panting. She still held Purple Cuckoo's hand and continued after a while, "Mei-mei, I have only one wish. I have no attachment here. After my death, tell them to send my body back to the south––" She stopped again, and her eyes closed slowly. Purple Cuckoo felt her mistress' hand tighten over hers. Knowing this was a sign of the approaching end, she sent for Li Huan, who had gone back to her own apartment for a brief rest. When the latter returned with Quest Spring, Black Jade's hands were already cold and her eyes dull. They suppressed their sobs and hastened to dress her. Suddenly Black Jade cried, "Pao-yu, Pao-yu, how––" Those were her last words. Above their own lamentations, Li Huan, Purple Cuckoo, and Quest Spring thought they heard the soft notes of an ethereal music in the sky. They went out to see what it was, but all they could hear was the rustling of the wind through the bamboos and all they could see was the shadow of the moon creeping down the western wall."

"The translation is singularly accurate, and the work of adaptation skillfully performed."

"This woman was Cathy Berberian, a personality in her own right, an artist of the rarest kind and a splendid singer to boot. Everything she did bore the hallmarks of authenticity. Whether it was early music (Monteverdi) or contemporary works (Berio, Kurt Weill and Stravinsky), everything rang true. And as for Debussy, I don't think anyone could sing him better. She has a way with Sprechgesang that won me over completely. She's a mistress of metamorphosis, a female chameleon. At the time of her concert, she was suffering from a dreadful cold, but it didn't stop her from singing for a moment. Mastery and total freedom. And the wit that she brought to her impersonations! And the way the danced the Azerbaijani song, as well as the Offenbach and Gershwin! What a phenomenal talent!"

"Multiculturalism is a false euphemism. The real word is "multiracialism", but the word "race" has been recently erased from French legislature, because supposedly there are no races. Here we can observe a new illogicality of the System. There are supposedly no races, but the media are increasingly talking about the rise of racism. How then racists can exist, if there are no races? Nevertheless, we have all too much empirical data showing precisely that multi-ethnic and multicultural countries are prone to ethnic and racial conflicts. What former Yugoslavia went through is in store for the EU - of course, in a different form. One of the additional reasons I left American academia is that I could no longer tolerate giving undeserved passing grades to my American students of African and Hispanic origin, whose IQ and speed of symbolic reasoning were much lower than that of my white American students. It is a form of tyranny of political correctness, much like the former Soviet Union."

"The future of our country depends on our educational institutions. They will be kept democratic."

"Let us not forget that the future includes more women in the ministry than we have ever known before."

"Yesterday’s woman was expected to have individual interests, caring for the brightness of the hearth fire and the comforts of the family group. Today she has inherited the community and the community’s welfare. Civics, religion and education have become her field of activity. She is homemaker and citizen."

"Religion and education meet in their responsibility to make possible the abundant life—the terms are intellectual and spiritual, rather than material. Humane living is assured only to those ... who have disciplined themselves to choose and who have the ardor to strive for the excellent “with heart and soul and mind.”"

"[E]ducation in a democracy, in our democracy, must use all the instruments of civilization, home, church, community, as well as school, for the adequate, suitable development of each child. This means that character and imagination, as well as heart and hand, are developed together."

"Horace Mann said that one former was worth a thousand reformers. And if you are going to keep justice and liberty alive, you lawyers, we teachers will try to become what we were meant to be, the formers of the character of our citizens."

"Today in a land where all women inherit civic responsibility, where professions and business are open to all comers without distinction of sex, leadership through direct influence is woman’s unchallenged heritage."

"She is a life member of more literary organizations than probably any other woman of California."

"You felt that she cared greatly about you as an individual. She believe in you and what you could become, and her faith in you, like her optimism, was contagious, giving you self-confidence and power so that you could not doubt yourself. She had a strange capacity for making you feel capable of anything."

"as distinguished a Unitarian as there is in the land"

"There are two things one should see on a trip West: the Grand Canyon and Dr. Reinhardt."

"I cannot be associated with a publication that dumps a staff member simply because his work has upset some readers. Journalism, when done well, always angers some readers, and it is the duty of the newspaper or magazine’s editors and managers to stand by writers and other members of the staff when readers complain about the analysis and opinions expressed by its staff. This is all the more true in the case of editorial cartoonists, whose very job is satire—and a good satirist never pauses to worry about angering the citizenry."

"Yes, India is the land of the Gods par excellence... The experience of the divine presence in India is within the reach of anyone who searches even a little bit. The temples are full of flowers and offerings, and you only have to flow along with the crowd, melt into it and place yourself in the hands of the Gods. I do not advocate conversion to Hinduism, but I do recommend its inspiration. I told this to the brahmins that took me into their homes. One said, 'Establish your reawakened Paganism on a valid foundation and there'll come a day when it will catch on. It won't be long.' As true Pagans, they feel no need to convert anyone."

"One can convert to the major, organized religions or to a school of ethics, but one cannot convert to Paganism. One simply belongs to it."

"I have two small altars where I burn incense when I have time and I'm in the mood, but I'm not really a pious practitioner. Modern living being what it is, I am not much into practice, but my thought, on the other hand, goes on uninterrupted."

"A hundred years ago, the idea was rampant in public opinion that Pagans were barbarians, grown-up children who worshiped pieces of wood. Today one tends to describe them as villains, as Nazis. In a very subtle way, Paganism is disenfranchised as a faith and presented as a highly dangerous and regressive movement."

"This current of thought, which has developed mainly in the United States in the Protestant context, claims witchcraft as its own, which makes me boil. They start off with the principle that in the European countryside a tradition of black magic has survived as an aspect of Paganism. They claim to be bringing forth an organized, conscious religion which has survived through the centuries as an underground movement. This is a historical hallucination and, alas, they are founding a Pagan renaissance upon this decadence."

"I was motivated not so much by belief, as by loyalty to my Pagan ancestors, who were loyal to their Gods, worshiping underground, always resisting, and who punctuate our history."

"I am taking the high road, an ascetic path, but one which to my way of thinking is the only valid path which in the long run has got what it takes. It's a slow and sometimes discouraging undertaking. At times it can seem a little bewildering. Europe is yet far from being re-Paganized, but little by little, thinkers catch the idea and feel reconquered. Generally, it doesn't take much: an image, an attitude, an experience, rather than a speech, and everything that has been repressed has come back ever so strongly. Our role is that of waker-uppers."

"I have no idea what forms this Paganism will have in another 30 years, I think we will be surprised. The Gods will manifest more and more--it's a matter of survival for the Earth, our Mother. That we Pagans are ever more numerous to worry over Her future is surely a sign of the Gods who act through us."

"When I dug into this temple, which had been destroyed by the Christians, I was shocked... I was barely 15, yet I understood in a powerful hands-on, nonintellectual way, how harsh had been Europe's conversion to Christianity. They burned temples, smashed statues, massacred the priests and established extremely harsh laws. By 392 ce, Paganism died."

"Buddhism, it may be said, finds religious authority not only in texts and institutions, but also in enlightened people. Certainly, those undersood as realized have occupied and important if not always well defined place within the early and developed tradition."

"The puzzle is why so many people live so badly. Not so wickedly, but so inanely. Not so cruelly, but so stupidly. There is little to admire and less to imitate in the people who are prominent in our culture. We have celebrities but not saints. Famous entertainers amuse a nation of bored insomniacs. Infamous criminals act out the aggressions of timid conformists. Petulant and spoiled athletes play games vicariously for lazy and apathetic spectators. People, aimless and bored, amuse themselves with trivia and trash. Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of justice gets headlines."

"Creativity is difficult. When you are being creative, you’re living by faith. You don’t know what’s next because the created, by definition, is what’s never been before. So you’re living at the edge of something in which you’re not very confident. You might fail: in fact, you almost certainly will fail a good part of the time. All the creative persons I know throw away most of the stuff they do."

"In everything we are destroyers—even in the instruments of destruction to which we turn for relief. The very socialism and internationalism through which our choked spirit seeks utterance, which seem to threaten your way of life, are alien to our spirit's demands and needs. Your socialists and internationalists are not serious. The charm of these movements, the attraction, such as it is, which they exercise, is only in their struggle: it is the fight which draws your gentile radicals."

"We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you do will meet our needs and demands. We will destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build. Beyond all temporary alliances with this or that action lies the ultimate split in nature and destiny, the enmity between the Game and God."

"The thinking man needs no scientist to teach him the wonder of creation: he needs neither a telescope nor a microscope in order to see God; nor do formulae teach him the nature of God. Life itself, being, the staggering wonder of mere existence, fills completely, crams beyond all possibility of addition, the faculty of astonishment and bewilderment in the sensitive man. Those to whom existence has become commonplace by familiarity—or who have never been smitten prostrate by the riddle of existence—need a crescendo succession of "shockers" to touch their brutish minds. They didn't know the marvel of the universe until they learned of electricity; but now that electricity is as commonplace as sunlight, they need a theory of relativity; and when that is played out as an advertising stunt for the ingenuity of the Almighty, they will need something else."

"The fool that saith in his heart there is no God is the city fool to whom nothing is wonderful any more: and those who do not know wonder do not know God."

"Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use."

"Perchance — He knows — canst thou not trust His love?"

"Nothing says "enough" like a bus on fire."

"In Venezuela, the rejection of neoliberalism in the streets during the Caraczao led not only Chavez's election, but also to a long and continuing experiment in radical democracy that continues to this day in new institutions of local self-government, known as communes. At the time of the Carcazo, Chavez and others had been conspiring both within the army and alongside clandestine revolutionary groups, but the spontaneous rebellion by the people in the streets caught them off guard and forced them into action. On February, 1992, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement attempted to depose Perez in a coup d'etat that failed to seize power."

"Our is increasingly an age of riots and rebellions, of radical self-creation in the streets: from London to Paris, the Arab Spring to Occupy, and more recently, the explosive fury of Ferguson and Baltimore. We are justifiably excited by the heat of the crowd; our collective pulse may even rise at the sight of masks, broken glass, and flames, because for so long these have represented the shards of the old world through which shines the glint of the new. Indeed, the global rebelliousness of the present owes much to the revolt - and repression - that marked Venezuela's and Latin America's own awakening."

"There is nothing remarkable about the people in premodern South Asia having a clear and accurate conception of the spatial organization of their world."

"“How, concretely, does one do Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz in a world of pretty well tattered scholarly paradigms?”"

"“An example of this more sophisticated orientalism is the work of Paul Thieme”... esp. his “analysis of the Sanskrit word ārya, where at the end he adverts to the main point of his research: to go beyond India in order to catch the ‘distant echo of Indo-germanic customs’.”"

"“Moving beyond orientalism finally presupposes moving beyond the culture of domination and the politics of coercion that have nurtured orientalism in all its varieties, and been nurtured by it in turn.”"

"“In German Indology of the NS era, a largely nonscholarly mystical nativism deriving ultimately from a mixture of romanticism and protonationalism merged with that objectivism of Wissenschaft earlier described, and together they fostered the ultimate ‘orientalist’ project, the legitimation of genocide.”"

"“The Ŗg-Veda as an Aryan text ‘free of any taint of Semitic contact’; the ‘almost Nordic zeal’ that lies in the Buddhist conception of the marga [way]; the ‘Indo-Germanic religion-force’ of yoga; the sense of race and the ‘conscious desire for racial protection’; the ‘volksnahe kingship’ such is the meaning of the Indo-Aryan past for the National Socialist present, a present that, for Wüst, could not be understood without this past.”"

"“From among the complexities of NS analysis of the Urheimat question it is worth calling attention to the way the nineteenth-century view expressed by Schlegel was reversed: the original Indo-Europeans were now variously relocated in regions of the Greater German Reich; German thereby became the language of the core (Binnensprache), whereas Sanskrit was transformed into one of its peripheral, ‘colonial’ forms.”"

"... there exist no good accounts or theorizations of the end of the cultural order that for two millennia exerted a trans-regional influence across Asia-South, Southeast, Inner, and even East Asia- that was unparalleled until the rise of Americanism and global English. We have no clear understanding of whether, and if so, when, Sanskrit culture ceased to make history; whether, and if so, why, it proved incapable of preserving into the present the creative vitality it displayed in earlier epochs, and what this loss of affectivity might reveal about those factors within the wider world of society and polity that had kept it vital."

"For one thing, Sanskrit literary culture was never affected by communicative incompetence, which began to enfeeble Latin from at least the ninth century. The process of vernacularization in India, in so many ways comparable to the European case, was nowhere a consequence of growing Sanskrit ignorance."

"The Veda, the transcendent śāstra, subsumes all knowledge."

"‘Such voices … in any case are pretty much in the minority. The dominant ideology is that which ascribes clear priority and absolute competence to shastric codification.’"

"We may in fact characterize the ideological effects of the shastric paradigm more broadly as follows: First, all contradiction between the model of cultural knowledge and actual cultural change is thereby at once transmuted and denied; creation is really re-creation, as the future is, in a sense, the past. Second, the living, social, historical, contingent tradition is naturalized, becoming as much a part of the order of things as the laws of nature themselves: Just as the social, historical phenomenon of language is viewed by Mīmāṃsā as natural and eternal, so the social dimension and historicality of all cultural practices are eliminated in the shastric paradigm. And finally, through such denial of contradiction and reification of tradition, the sectional interests of pre-modern India are universalized and valorized. The theoretical discourse of śāstra becomes in essence a practical discourse of power."

"Pattanaik makes a good observation when he writes that high-profile India-watching academics “need to indulge America’s saviour complex if they need a share of the shrinking funding. The objective of the research needs to alleviate the misery of some victim and challenge a villain. And so, Doniger will provide evidence of how Puranic tales reinforce Brahmin hegemony, while Pollock will begin his essays on Ramayana with reference to Babri Masjid demolition, reminding readers that his paper has a political, not merely a theoretical, purpose.”... Sheldon Pollock, a very good Sanskritist at least in a purely linguistic sense, is more explicitly involved with the anti-Hindu discourse promoted in India by the missionaries and the Ambedkarites, and their first line of attack, the “secularists”. He has pioneered some valid insights into the Sanskrit “cosmopolis”, which did not oppress vernacular languages from Gandhari to Javanese but fruitfully coexisted with them to their mutual benefit. But at the same time, he has helped greatly in belittling and politicizing the Ramayana and in promoting the “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good” thesis. This is not very original, in fact it is only a sophisticated formulation of widely-held views. ... But in this discourse of hate, which instrumentalizes Buddhism as a bludgeon to beat Hinduism with, Pollock has gone farther than all others. In 1993 he published a paper arguing that Hinduism (particularly the Mimansa school, Brahminical par excellence) sits at the centre of Nazi doctrine. Yes, it is long ago, and partly explainable from the war psychology emanating from the Ayodhya controversy, in which he explicitly sided with the negationist school denying Islam’s well-documented destructive role in Hindu history. But he has never retracted this position and has remainthis position and has remainthis position and has remained a leading voice in anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin discourse.... “Being placed on a high pedestal is central to both strategies. Criticism also evokes a similar reaction in both sides – they quickly declare themselves as misunderstood heroes and martyrs, and stir up their legion of followers. Doniger and Pollock have inspired an army of activist-academicians who sign petitions to keep ‘dangerous’ Indian leaders and intellectuals out of American universities and even American soil”: Subramanian Swamy, Narendra Modi, and in similar controversies Rajiv Malhotra, the Dharma Civilization Foundation and others. Indeed, the Indological community’s touching (occasional) concern for freedom of speech is not erga omnes... “Despite their deep knowledge of Hinduism, neither Elst nor Frawley, neither Doniger nor Pollock, believe in letting go and moving on, which is the hallmark of Hindu thought, often deemed as a feminine trait. Instead,... Doniger and Pollock keep reminding their readers that Hinduism’s seductive ‘spirituality’ must at no point distract one from its communal and casteist truths.”"

"I am not alone in making this point. At least one European Indologist accuses Pollock of relocating Orientalism 'to the "New Raj" across the deep blue sea'... He [Grünendahl] says Pollock's narrative 'is not an evidence-based study of Orientalism or Indology in Germany, but a sophisticated charge of anti-Semitism based largely on trumped-up "evidence".... Pollock's post-Orientalist messianism would have us believe that only late twentieth-century (and now twenty-first century) America is intellectually equipped to reject and finally overcome [‘Eurocentrism’...] The path from the 'Deep Orientalism' of old to a new 'Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz' leads to the 'New Raj' across the deep blue sea.... Thus, Grünendahl has noted Pollock's tendency to develop broad narratives without any supporting evidence. Moreover, he draws attention to Pollock's messianism in promoting American scholarship.... , casting doubt on Pollock's attempt to analyse Sanskrit objectively. He raises the pertinent question as to whether Pollock is providing the intellectual foundations for America's 'New Raj', to replace the dead British Raj - i.e., whether American imperialism is replacing the dead British imperialism."

"“As was the case with the 1933/34 volume and Rhys Davids’s paper of 1904, none serve to corroborate Pollock’s presumptions. The same holds for recent evidence-based studies that in any way pertain to such issues […], all of which confirm that Pollock’s deep ruminations on ‘the political economy of Indology in Germany in the period 1800–1945’ (1993: 118n5) are entirely unfounded. Nevertheless, his attendant admonition that this is an ‘important question’ awaiting ‘serious analysis’ (118n5) has become a kind of gospel, recited by others […] with increasing confidence, but with very little to show as yet in terms of substantiation. Yet, all this while, dozens of ‘histories of German Indology’ are built on the—still unfulfilled—promises of that gospel.”"

"“The fundamental flaw of Pollock’s narrative is that it hinges entirely on the exact reverse of the ‘Nordic’ notion. This reversal, which provides the basis for the ‘founding myth’ of the entire discourse machinery he set in motion, is enshrined in the grotesque proposition that ‘the Germans… continued, however subliminally, to hold the nineteenth-century conviction that the origin of European civilization was to be found in India (or at least that India constituted a genetically related sibling)’ (1993:77) Even to the Romantic period [end of 18th, early 19th century, when this notion was upheld by Johann Herder], this assertion only holds with considerable qualifications (…) To make it the basis for theorizing any aspect of the NS period is rendered absurd by the above-mentioned texts alone”."

"Wilhelm Halbfass, the late Indologist at the University of Pennsylvania, took such ridiculous statements into strange, speculative areas and wrote: Would it not be equally permissible to identify this underlying structure as 'deep Nazism' or 'deep Mimamsa'? And what will prevent us from calling Kumarila and William Jones 'deep Nazis' and Adolf Hitler a 'deep Mimamsaka'?"

"One of his [Pollock's] goals is to critique and expunge what he sees as deeply entrenched static social hierarchies, barbarisms and poisons. I do not see anything inherently wrong with this intention by itself; most Hindus welcome improvements and the evolution of their culture. The issue worth debating is that Pollock sees these ills as deeply rooted in the Vedas themselves and as requiring the abandonment of core metaphysical and sacred perspectives."

"It is important for Pollock that Muslims not be blamed for the decline of Sanskrit. He writes that any theory 'can be dismissed at once' if it 'traces the decline of Sanskrit culture to the coming of Muslim power'. ... The contradiction between his two accounts, published separately, is serious: Muslim invasions created a traumatic enough shockwave to cause Hindu kings to mobilize the 'cult of Rama' and therefore the Hindus funded the production of extensive Ramayana texts for this agenda. And yet, the death of Sanskrit taking place at the same time had little relation to the arrival of Muslims. When Hindus are to be blamed for their alleged hatred towards Muslims, the Muslims are shown to have an important presence; but when Muslims are to be protected from being assigned any responsibility for destruction, they are mysteriously made to disappear from the scene."

"Grünendahl cites many examples where Pollock and his defender Adluri manipulate quotations to make past authors witnesses for their accusations. I vaguely knew that Pollock was wrong in associating the OIT with National-Socialism, but not that he was so spectacularly wrong. His thesis is first of all that India was a central concern for the Nazis. This is put forward most emphatically (but only with bluff) by Pollock and, on his authority, generally taken for granted... The Nazi regime’s favourite historian H.K.F. Günther believed the homeland lay in Southeastern Europe. This was the reigning opinion in Europe, challenged only by some Nazis who insisted on Germany or Scandinavia as the homeland. All of them agreed that the Indo-European language family had only reached India through an Aryan invasion... Let us add that Marchand agrees to include among the Nazi Indologists Paul Thieme, the revered teacher of Michael Witzel; and he was, like his more militant pupil, a believer in the AIT."

"Pollock’s attempt to even link the Out-of-India Theory with the Nazi worldview is the diametrical opposite of the truth; it was the rivalling Aryan Invasion Theory (which Pollock himself upholds) that formed the cornerstone and perfect illustration of the Nazi worldview. This linking could only pass peer review because of the general animus against Hinduism and Indo-European indigenism in American academe. The whole forced attempt to associate Hinduism with National-Socialism suggests a rare animosity against Hinduism.... Yes, that is how the Nazis saw it because they were racist and anti-Semitic to begin with. But the knowledge of the Sanskrit tradition could add absolutely nothing to that. There was nothing in the Vedas themselves that suggested anti-Semitism, it was entirely in the eye of the beholder. .... But the objective finality of Pollock’s thesis is more specific, viz. to blacken the Indian homeland hypothesis by associating it with National-Socialism. Reality, however, is just the opposite: more even than other Europeans, the Nazis espoused and upheld a westerly homeland and the invasion hypothesis. This invasion happens to be a corner-stone of Pollock’s worldview, with invader castes guilty of expropriating and subjugating the natives, who became the lower castes. Hitler-Pollock, same struggle!... Pollock’s own enumeration of supposedly India-related activities usually confuses “Indian” with “Indo-European”, i.e. “Aryan” or essentially “Nordic”. It is only by confusing those two that an impression of a NS orientation towards India can be created.... That is certainly the NS reading, but from a top Indologist, we might have expected an explanation of whether this was the Indians’ own intended reading. He doesn’t go into this question at all but confidently assumes an indubitably positive answer. To exonerate him, we might take this as merely a logical application of the Aryan invasion scenario, firmly established since the mid-19th century: the Aryans came in, met a different race of aboriginals, and imposed a racial Apartheid on them: the caste system. So, in a way, the case against Pollock is the case against Western Indology as a whole. ... The situation with allegations is simple: either you prove them, or you yourself are guilty of slander. This then can be held against Pollock: he has made a grave allegation, yet has failed to buttress it with proof, though not for lack of trying... The question which Hindus should contemplate, then, is this one. Should the Sanskrit tradition be given in care to a pofessor of Sanskrit who stands by such a grave though false allegation against it?"

"Have I not told you that the white men are as thick as the blades of grass' I have been to the lodge of the Great Father. I know what I say! Now break up your council of war. Leave here - and I will make you a great feast."

"Shame on you, cowards to come here, five thousand of you, to slaughter a half-dozen white men. And you come here for what reason? You have been killing their cattle right along, day after day, and not one of them has said anything to you about the loss - and then when you shoot one of your own people, you come here to kill a white man for it ... You are not brave to come here to kill a half-dozen white men!"

"This man belongs to me now! You cannot touch him!"

"As Mrs. Galpin stood in the midst of that immense crowd of blood-thirsty Indians, and argued and pleaded for lives of the white men, regardless of her own perilous position, it was the grandest spectacle I ever saw, or ever expect to see taking all the circumstances into account."

"Interesting persons who occupied cabins were Mrs. Charles E. Galpin and her daughter, Miss Lou Galpin [sic], the former being the wife of Maj. Galpin, the famous trader ... Mrs. Galpin was a woman of unusual mental capacity, who was well known throughout the Dakota country, and her daughter had been well educated in St. Louis. They were just returning to Grand River Agency from Chicago, where they had been procuring a wedding trousseau for Miss Lou, who was soon to be married to Capt. Harmon."

"An Indian woman, names Mrs. Galpin, is also with the [1872 Sioux delegation to Washington D.C.]; she has been a great friend of the whites and has more influences with the hostile Indians than most of the chiefs"

"I consider her a very meritorious person and trust that she will remain unmolested in her laudable efforts to educate her children. Mrs. Galpin is the bright particular star of the Sioux Nation, and I honor her for her former deeds and for her present unexceptionable conduct."

"Mrs. Galpin ... is one of the finest women in the world ... She speaks no English, only her native Sioux. She is a friend of her own race and also of the whites. Her friendship is not proved by words but by deeds."

"Memory, about the futile struggle to remember. It’s a eulogy to all the people who flee the terrible conditions in their home countries, desperately hoping for a better life here, and never make it."

"Cuba is at the heart of my fiction, even when it’s just an echo, like in “Kimberle.” I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t remember in some conscious way that I’m Cuban. But my relationship with Cuba changes as time goes by, not just because of changes in Cuba but because of changes in my own life. When my son was born almost six years ago, it totally altered everything. For example, instead of going to Cuba, I spent a great deal more time in Miami, because that’s where my mom lived, and I really wanted my son and my mom to have a relationship…"

"What I’m most obsessed with is the tension between the private and the public self. In Cuba, we call it a “doble moraleja” but in reality, it’s more than that. It’s like people have two completely different realities. That’s very hard. Everyone says that it’s a political situation, but in reality it totally affects your life in every way. You start to become complicit in things that are quite terrible…"

"When you’re confronted with your community being rendered invisible to the culture-at-large, a mission as straightforward as nurturing and promoting your community’s storytellers can, in my view, be viewed as a form of activism. Another, if one works in a context like mine, is exposing one’s students to the work of your community’s poets and writers…"

"When I started to make translations I was just doing it intuitively, and my tendency was to stick to the original as much as possible. Then I gained more confidence in my own poetry and my own writing and I began to become less concerned about being strictly faithful to the original and more concerned with producing a good poem in English. What I have often found—especially in the translations that are done by scholars—is that they’re very faithful to the content of the original language, but in English they don’t really sound that good as poems."

"The advice to any young poet is to embrace your freedom and not feel constrained to write in one particular way or only about one particular topic. If they’re Latino poets, I would encourage them not only to read widely, but also to read Latino poetry, to familiarize themselves with their particular tradition within American literature…"

"At the risk of over-generalizing, my sense is that American poetry, where popular culture is concerned, is a poetry of freedom and permission—that there are certainly poets who embrace it and have enjoyed success, from a publishing perspective, in embracing it…"

"It’s a 21st-century play…The overarching theme is, how do we find peace in the present? Through love, understanding and learning about our cultural and religious differences."

"This story contains many elements of my journey as a writer. As a Spanish-American, I gain much of my inspiration from the Latin world and often write about how the Anglo and Latin worlds collide, intersect and transform each other. I also draw huge inspiration from my father's Spanish family of artists. Dealing with loss has also been an area I've continually explored as a writer…"

"If I could change one thing about U.S. theater, theater companies would produce a wider, broader range of plays by women and men who fully represent the cultural complexity of twenty-first century U.S. culture. Theatergoers would then have access to a huge selection of diverse theatrical worlds that would challenge, entertain, delight and intrigue them…"

"Patience and perseverance are key. Cultivate a spirit of generosity. Find your tribe of collaborators and keep working with them. Trust your gut. Stay true to your vision. Seek mentorship…"

"The vanishing middle-class, distinct rich/poor class divisions in the US and poverty continue to be issues that nag and tear at the social fabric but rarely are put front and centre in plays and works for live performance. I don’t think every play needs to address these topics, of course. I do think the daily lives of citizens—the sheer struggle to get by, make do, and the increased dependency on credit (and therefore, debt) are issues that affect everyone…"

"There are so many “invisible” stories still, and one of the beauties of writing for the stage is making these so-called “invisible” stories seen and heard and felt. In terms of form, I think my work as a dramatist is becoming starker and leaner, rather than more baroque…"

"Plays are events in time and space. Plays are music. Word music. Visual music. I’ve always thought of plays as a form of composition—of text and the architecture of the experience of the full-length evening…"

"These type of stories still go on. This is something that has to be said. It’s been done in many ways, but I think that theater being done live has a different impact. And when we come out of the show we stop and think–”What can I do in my society to make it better?”"

"In our culture ... people who don't submit to their lust are said to be repressed and have all kinds of warped beasts in the basement. So the part of the mind that thrives when it's freed from lust doesn't get a chance. It gets pushed into the corner of the basement. It becomes the repressed part."

""The Interactive Present" (2002)"

"Ardently alert means that when the mind is staying with the breath, you try to be as sensitive as possible in adjusting it to make it feel good, and in monitoring the results of your efforts. Try long breathing to see how it feels. Try short breathing, heavy breathing, light breathing, deep, shallow. The more refined you can make your awareness, the better the meditation goes because you can make the breath more and more refined, a more and more comfortable place for the mind to stay. Then you can let that sense of comfort spread throughout the body. Think of the breath not simply as the air coming in and out the lungs, but as the flow of energy throughout the whole body. The more refined your awareness, the more sensitive you can be to that flow. The more sensitive you are, the more refined the breath becomes, the more gratifying, the more absorbing it becomes as a place to stay."

"This is the basic trick in getting the mind to settle down in the present moment — you've got to give it something that it likes to stay with. If it's here against its will, it's going to be like a balloon you push under the water. As long as your hand has a good grasp on the balloon, it's not going to pop up, but as soon as you slip a little bit, the balloon pops up out of the water. If the mind is forced to stay on an object that it really finds unpleasant, it's not going to stay. As soon as your mindfulness slips just a little bit, it's gone."

"Maybe you can't make the whole body comfortable, but make at least part of the body comfortable and stay with that part. As for the pains, let them be in the other part. They have every right to be there, so make an arrangement with them. They stay in one part, you stay in another. But the essential point is that you have a place where the mind feels stable, secure, and comfortable in the present moment. These are the beginning steps in meditation."

"Society tends to slough off the problems of aging, illness, and death, tends to push them off to the side because other things seem more pressing. Making a lot of money is more important. Having fulfilling relationships is more important. Whatever. And the big issues in life — the fact that you're headed for the sufferings and indignities that come with an aging, ill, or dying body — get pushed off, pushed out of the way. "Not yet, not yet, maybe some other time." And of course when that other time does arrive and these things come barging in, they won't accept your "not yet," won't be pushed out anymore. If you haven't prepared yourself for them, you'll really be up the creek, at a total loss."

"our sense of self is an activity, a strategy for avoiding suffering, for maximizing happiness."

"You let go of the grosser forms of happiness, the grosser strategies for happiness, and get used to more and more refined ones. And they finally take you to the point where there’s no course left but to let go of strategies. All strategies. It’s like painting yourself into a corner. The only way to get out of the corner is not to be anywhere. When you can manage that, you see that what the Buddha taught was right. He really knew what he was talking about. This is the way to true happiness."

"Sometimes you hear the idea that the ego is so corrupt that anything it tries to do is going to be corrupted as well. That idea closes off all the doors except for one: the hope that somebody is going to come along and save you. But that hope is irresponsible. The responsible attitude is that you’re responsible for the actions of your mind. You really can choose. And fortunately your motives are not always corrupt. As the Buddha said, you can take advantage of the fact that you want true happiness, and develop some noble qualities out of that. The qualities of purity, compassion, and wisdom come from taking your desire for true happiness seriously."

"I remember when I first went to Singapore. I marveled at how planned everything was. But the sense of marvel was not totally positive. They had everything laid out for you: where you were going to be born, what you were going to do as a child, where you were going to get your education, where they would channel you when you’d go to work. They had things planned out for your retirement, and then for your death. It gives rise to the feeling that you might as well go ahead and die and get it over with, if that was going to circumscribe the totality of your life. But thinking about the possibility that true awakening can be found through your efforts: that breaks through those circumscribed limits. That’s not part of anybody else’s plan, but that can be part of your plan. And to whatever extent you can nurture that conviction, it keeps your heart nurtured and nourished as well."

"There’s a passage where [the Buddha] contrasts his way of teaching with what he calls training in bombast. Training in bombast is where you’re taught things that are very poetic, that sound very high, very lovely, very inspiring, but no one is encouraged to ask what, precisely, they mean. After all, in bombast there really is no precise meaning. It’s all just vague, high-sounding words. But, as the Buddha said, he taught cross-questioning. Your training with him was in cross-questioning. When there was a teaching you didn’t understand, he encouraged you to ask, “What’s the meaning of this? What’s the purpose of that? How far should this word be taken?” That way, wherever there are any doubts or uncertainties, you can clear them up."

"Through the history of the modern academic and culture, as we have noted, the definition of "magic" in relation to science and religion has been a major problem. At the root of the problem is the loaded, evaluative of "magic" as false, deceptive, discredited, or morally tainted, contrasted with both science (a correct, enlightened understanding of natural law and causation) and religion (a correct, enlightened understanding of the divine and spirituality). Thus, "magic" is relegated to the "they" side of a "we/they" . This is simultaneously unfair to the materials and practices studied under the heading of "magic," and self-serving for the materials (mainly those we identify as "our own") that are exempted from that label. It perpetuates a complacent ."

"The world of the was a wonderfully diverse and pluralistic world, and nowhere is that diversity and pluralism seen more clearly than in the text of ritual power that were produced and used by the people who inhabited that world."

"What is the worst thing about living near an open sewer? It is not that you sicken at the stench of it every time you leave your front door. It is that the noisome vapors are so pervasive, and you have lived with them so long, you no longer notice it. What is the worst thing about living in the rubble of a civilization? It is not that you shed a tear for the noble churches and courts and town halls you once knew, as you recall years filled with religious services, parades, block parties, and all the bumptious folderol of an ordinary civic life. It is that you do not even suspect that such things existed."

"If you are a really serious student, you will be in science, or finance, or politics—you will be in the business of money or power. Everything is about ourselves. We don’t want to study other cultures. We want to make other people study about us, and from our preferred point of view. I say to students, “Here, let me teach you about Milton,” the author of the greatest poem in the English language. The students reply, “No, let us teach you about us.” Dear Narcissus, there is a great and beautiful world beyond that pool."

"Like anything else that man makes, culture is nowhere pure, and is often shot through with dreadful evil. But it is in a way natural to man to cultivate a way of life that transcends the generations in time, and that in being reaches out to God himself. I suggest that the unnatural is to the natural as mass phenomena are to culture —especially the mass phenomena such as they are now."

"The academic politician is interested in victory. He has the moral code of Machiavelli, but, because he is too impatient to submit to the instruction of history, he has not the old master’s shrewd sense of human limitations and contradictions. He makes the worst of rulers: he is neither a lover of truth, nor a practical man of the world, nor an habitual examiner of his all-too-human and persistent failings."

"A nation of lost and fatherless boys and drifting young men is terrified that we have too much patriarchy. Why, it reinforces my belief in the existence of demons: unassisted man could never be so blank and stupid as to fear that fathers have too much authority when boys and girls by tens of millions grow up with none at all. Only Beelzebub can explain it. A nation of fornicators, sodomites, divorcees, pornographers, and users of pornography, a nation of casual obscenity, erupts in wrath against boorish flirting. A nation of cultural amnesia tears down memorials. A nation that murders a million of its children every year is full of benevolent neighbors who have the social workers at your door if they see your child riding a bicycle without a helmet. A nation of the religiously indifferent, ruled by innumerable and anonymous puppet-masters of bureaucracy, suspects a theocrat around every corner."

"Can water and oil mix? In the same manner, pure Islamic teachings and pure Western values are often antithetical to one another. For example, the West believes in freedom of religion, whereas in Islam those who seek to apostatize are penalized, including by death; the West believes in freedom of speech, whereas in Islam any critical talk concerning Muhammad can get one killed. One can go on and on but the point should be clear. Of course, a nominal/secular Muslim may be able to assimilate in a Western society, but that is not a reflection of Islam, which is hardly nominal but rather a full way of life based on sharia."

"The enlightenment tradition discovered the micro and macro dimensions more than two thousand years ago by using sophisticated contemplative practices to augment the sixth mental sense of inner vision … This realm is supernatural only in relation to a constricted definition of natural. It is mystical only when its analytic investigation is not completed. It is magic only when the technique involved is not understood."

"The Bolshevik Revolution has emancipated the Jews as individuals, and — what is much more — as a group capable of developing a full national life. To this extent it has been a twofold gain, greater perhaps than the gain of the Frech Revolution to West European Jewry."

"There has been a considerable penetration of the ranks of Jewry by Communism, and Jewry in turn has come to wield a considerable power in the Communist Party."

"By way of conclusion: facility is not enough. Blood and sweat—yes, and tears as well—are the secret of the thing."

"We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread. They vary in age from six and seven years (in the cotton mills of Georgia) and eight, nine and ten years (in the coal-breakers of Pennsylvania), to fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years in more enlightened states."

"No other portion of the wage earning class increased so rapidly from decade to decade as the young girls from fourteen to twenty years...They are in commerce, in offices, in manufacturing."

"Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy."

"If the mothers and the teachers in Georgia could vote, would the Georgia Legislature have refused at every session for the last three years to stop the work in the mills of children under twelve years of age? Would the New Jersey Legislature have passed that shameful repeal bill enabling girls of fourteen years to work all night, if the mothers in New Jersey were enfranchised? Until the mothers in the great industrial states are enfranchised, we shall none of us be able to free our consciences from participation in this great evil. No one in this room tonight can feel free from such participation. The children make our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings, our knitted underwear in the knitting factories. They spin and weave our cotton underwear in the cotton mills. Children braid straw for our hats, they spin and weave the silk and velvet wherewith we trim our hats. They stamp buckles and metal ornaments of all kinds, as well as pins and hat-pins. Under the sweating system, tiny children make artificial flowers and neckwear for us to buy. They carry bundles of garments from the factories to the tenements, little beasts of burden, robbed of school life that they may work for us."

"We do not wish this. We prefer to have our work done by men and women. But we are almost powerless. Not wholly powerless, however, are citizens who enjoy the right of petition. For myself, I shall use this power in every possible way until the right to the ballot is granted, and then I shall continue to use both."

"What can we do to free our consciences? There is one line of action by which we can do much. We can enlist the workingmen on behalf of our enfranchisement just in proportion as we strive with them to free the children. No labor organization in this country ever fails to respond to an appeal for help in the freeing of the children."

"For the sake of the children, for the Republic in which these children will vote after we are dead, and for the sake of our cause, we should enlist the workingmen voters, with us, in this task of freeing the children from toil!"

"Although many social workers like Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, and socialists like Emma Goldman advocated the rights of immigrants and working women, in most instances during the 1890 to 1910 period their advocacy had little or no effect on the suffragist movement's attitude toward minority or working-class women"

"Florence Kelley's speech first opened my mind to the necessity for and the possibility of the work which became my vocation."

"I want to speak of Florence Kelley, whom I knew in this period and who was one of the first American women Socialists who influenced me greatly. Florence Kelley made an important contribution to the literature of socialism in this country by her translation of Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, and her own writings. She was for many years secretary of the National Consumers' League of America and a leading member of the National Child Labor Committee. Her influence was great among working class women and her death in 1932 was a terrible loss. In those days the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was a vigorous organization. I remember one occasion when the I.S.S. was giving a dinner in New Haven at which Florence Kelley was the main speaker. The chairman, Graham Phelps Stokes, was called away at the last moment, and Upton Sinclair, one of the vice-presidents, was called upon to preside. In introducing Mrs. Kelley he explained the purposes of the I.S.S. and how people were drawn into the socialist movement through its activities, attracting even such nationally known persons as Mrs. Kelley. Mrs. Kelley got up and told him that she had been a Socialist before he was dry behind the ears."

"irresistible has been the influence exercised by Mrs. Florence Kelley, now and for many years a member of the settlement family. She has long consecrated her energies to securing protective legislation throughout the country for children compelled to labor and, with the late Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Alabama, suggested the creation of the National Child Labor Committee. In its ten years' existence it has affected legislation in forty-seven states, which have enacted new or improved child labor laws. On this and on the New York State Committee Mrs. Kelley and I have served since their creation."

"Florence Kelley's vibrant personality comes back to me clearly...I had a special interest in Florence Kelley because she had been the first chief factory inspector in Illinois, appointed by Governor Altgeld. With admiration I saw her war on child labor, sweatshops, and laws discriminating against women-often in the face of great obstacles, including whispering campaigns of slander set in motion by her enemies. I can see her now on the platform, answering a reactionary opponent who in a debate on a vital piece of legislation, claimed to be "open-minded." She replied that some people were so open-minded that ideas never stayed in their heads."

"Unfortunately, for a short period it became fashionable to read this epic in cultural terms – Aryan vs. Dravidian. This, in my view, is a misreading of the fundamental premise of the epic: the opposition between two views of life, one epitomized by Rama, the other by Ravana. What makes Kamban so great is that he presents both views in extremely convincing and beautiful terms – Ravana is the greatest of all kings and symbolizes this world, Rama symbolizes another dimension. And don't forget, Ravana is a Brahmin."

"Few concerns are as central to Islam as the search for knowledge (‘ilm). In the Koran God commands the Prophet, by universal Muslim consent the most knowledgeable of all human beings, to pray, “My Lord, increase me in knowledge!” (20:114). Muslims must imitate him in this quest. “Are they equal,” asks the Koran, “those who know and those who know not?” (39:9). The answer is self-evident. Hence, as the Prophet said, “The search for knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim.”'"

"Knowledge is the most all-encompassing of the divine attributes, which is to say that “God is Knower of all things” (Koran 4:176, 8:75, etc.). “Not a leaf falls, but He knows it” (6:59). Nothing escapes His knowledge of Himself or the other. “Our Lord embraces all things in knowledge” (Koran 7:89). The only attribute said to have the same all-encompassing nature is mercy, which is practically identical with existence.’ “Our Lord,” say the angels in the Koran, “Thou embracest all things in mercy and knowledge” (40:7)."

"The Koran commonly refers to the knowledge brought by the prophets as “remembrance” (dhikr) and “reminder” (dhikra, tadhkir), terms that derive from the root dh-k-r. The Koran calls itself by these words more than forty times, and it refers to other prophetic messages, like the Torah and the Gospel, by the same words. The basic Koranic understanding of the necessity for a plurality of prophets is that Adam’s children kept on falling into heedlessness and forgetfulness, which is the shortcoming of their father. The only cure for this shortcoming is the remembrance that God provides by means of the prophets."

"If forgetfulness and heedlessness mark the basic fault of human beings, dhikr (remembrance) designates their saving virtue. Just as forgetting God leads to the painful chastisement of being forgotten by him, so also remembering God leads to the joy of being remembered by him: "Remember Me, and I will remember you" (2:152)... God sends the prophets in order to remind people of the Covenant of Alast. They do so by reciting God's signs and mentioning their debt to him. People should respond to the prophets by remembering God, an act which demands that they mention him in prayers of glorification and praise (thus affirming both his tanzih and his tashbih). Those who respond in this manner are the people of faith, since to have faith is to recognize or remember the truth of tawhid in the heart, to mention it with the tongue, and to put it into practice by following the instructions brought by the prophets.Those people who fail to make the correct response are the truth-concealers. Although they recognize the truth in their hearts, they deny it with their tongues and refuse to follow the prophets' instructions. This, in short, is the drama of prophecy and the human response. All of it is connected explicitly by the Koran to the word dhikr, or to closely related words derived from the same root (such as dhikra, tadhkira, and tadhakkur)."

"Like the philosophers, Sufis aimed explicitly at overcoming the forgetfulness endemic to the human “soul” or “self” (the same word nafs is used in both senses). Like them they offered broad overviews of reality rooted in metaphysics (ilahiyyat, “the divine things”) while describing the human soul as a microcosm, created in the “form” (sura) of God. God, as the possessor of “the most beautiful names” (Quran 7:180), is “the most beautiful Creator’ (Quran 23:14) who “formed you and made your forms beautiful” (Quran 40:64, 64:3). Both Sufis and philosophers held that the soul’s original divine form, created in the “most beautiful stature” (Quran 95:4), corresponded perfectly with God and the macrocosm. The soul, however, had fallen out of balance because of forgetfulness and the misuse of free will, so it needed purification and rectification.... Repeatedly the Quran asks it's readers to heed the signs. “In the earth are signs for those with certainty, and in your souls, What, do you not see?” (51:20-21). It rebukes them for not employing their seeing, hearing, understanding, and witnessing to perceive the signs: “They have hearts but do not understand with them, they have eyes but do not see with them, they have ears but do not hear with them” (7:179). It pays close attention to the soul’s diverse attributes and character traits (akhlaq), praising the beautiful and condemning the ugly. Some forms of Quran commentary - an activity undertaken by specialists in every school of thought - interpreted many verses as allusions (isharat) to the manner in which the soul experiences the divine presence while climbing the ladder toward realization."

"The first function of the prophets is to “remind” people of their own divinely given reality. In speaking of this “reminder”, the Quran employs the word dhikr and several of its derivatives (é.g., dhikra, tadhkir, tadhkira). Moreover, it calls the human response to this reminder by the same word dhikr. The “reminder” that comes from the side of God by means of the prophets calls forth “remembrance” from the side of man. The use of the one word for a movement with two directions—from the Divine to the human and from the human to the Divine—is typical of the Quran’s unitary perspective. Here in fact there is only one motivating force, and that is the Divine activity that makes manifest the good, the true, and the beautiful, even if it appears to us as two different movements. Moreover, the Quran also makes it eminently clear that “remembrance”—the human response to reminder—does not mean simply to acknowledge the truth of tawhid. The word itself also means “to mention”. On the human side, dhikr is both the awareness of God and the expression of this awareness through language, whether vocal or silent."

"If dhikr represents both the function of the prophets and the proper human response to the prophets, guidance (huda) represents the divine attribute that is embodied in the prophets. It sums up in a single word both God's motivation for sending the prophets and their activity in the world. If the opposite of dhikr is forgetfulness and heedlessness, the opposite of guidance is misguidance (idlal) and leading astray (ighwa). Just as the prophets incarnate God's guidance, so also the satans incarnate the quality of misguidance and error...Besides Satan, others are also said to be the source of misguidance. Among these is caprice, which we have already met as the worst of all false gods: "Follow not caprice, lest it misguide you from the path of God" (38:26)."

"To be human is to be born with the fitra, which is an innate recognition of tawhid that is represented mythically by the Covenant of Alast and the Trust. There is nothing extraneous or superadded about this fitra—it is precisely what makes people human. But the fitra tends to become obscured by upbringing and circumstances, and then people become less than human. They are "deaf, dumb, blind—like the cattle; no, even further astray." Dhikr is the all-important remedy that makes possible the actualization of the fitra. Dhikr is both God's merciful response to heedlessness, and the human response to God's mercy."

"The idea that human beings recognize tawhid innately is often expressed by using the term fitra, which is commonly translated as "primordial nature" or "innate disposition."...The Koran employs the word fitra itself only once, along with the verb form of the word. Here we translate the verb as "bring forth." The Koran is addressing Muhammad and, by extension, every Muslim: "Set thy face to the religion as one with primordial faith—the fitra of God according to which He brought people forth. There is no changing the creation of God. That is the right religion, but most people do not know. [Set thy face to the religion] by turning to Him. And be wary of Him, and perform the salat, and be not one of those who associate others with Him." (30:30-31) Here the Koran connects religion with the nature that human beings were given when they were created. By being human, they have accepted the Trust and entered into the Covenant of Alast. They were taught the names, created in God's form, and singled out for God's vicegerency."

"In short, already in the Koran and the Hadith, we find the idea that human beings are created with an innate capacity that allows them to understand things as they really are, but this capacity is clouded by the human environment. The function of the prophets is to “remind” (dhikr) people of what they already know, while the duty of human beings is simply to “remember” (dhikr). Having remembered, they return to the innate capacity from which they have never really become separate.’ If the human spirit knows God and affirms tawhid at the moment of its creation, this is because this spirit is not completely separate from God. In describing the creation of human beings, the Koran says that God molded Adam’s clay with his own two hands, then blew into him of his own spirit. The spirit is God’s breath, and Muslim thinkers were well aware of the implications of the metaphor. Breath is different from the breather; yet it is also the same, since a person without breath is a corpse. The divine breath that animates human clay is not identical with God, nor is it completely different. Human beings are near to God through their spirits, but they are far from him through their bodies made out of clay. The qualities of spirit and body lie at opposite extremes. The spirit is perfect, luminous, alive, rational, aware, intelligent, powerful, desiring, speaking; in short, it possesses all the attributes of God. But the body displays none of these qualities to any perceptible degree. It is merely earth and water, which represent the lowest of created things. When God blows the spirit into clay, this gives rise to the soul or self (nafs), which is an intermediate reality that possesses qualities of both sides. Hence the soul—which is the level of ordinary awareness—lies between light and darkness, perfection and imperfection, intelligence and ignorance, rationality and irrationality, awareness and unawareness, power and weakness. Within the soul, the innate capacity is represented by the luminous qualities of the spirit that are only dimly present. Actualizing the innate capacity in its fullest measure is seen as the goal of human existence. The soul must be transmuted such that its darkness becomes fully infused with spiritual light."

"The potential infinity of the objects of human knowledge goes back to the fact that the creatures have already been “taught” this knowledge, for it is latent in the cosmos through God’s nearness or self-disclosure to all things. Since we already know everything, coming to know is in fact a remembrance or recollection (tadhakkur). In the process of explaining this, Ibn al-‘Arabi refers to the “taking (of Adam's seed) at the Covenant” (akhdh al-mithaq), when the children of Adam bore witness to God’s Lordship over them before their entrance into the sensory world. The Koran says, “When thy Lord took from the children of Adam, from their loins, their seed, and made them testify touching themselves: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yes, we testify’” (7:172)."

"The verse of Alast continues by explaining God's purpose in calling everyone to witness: ""Lest you say on the Day of Resurrection, "As for us, we were heedless of this," or lest you say, "Our fathers associated others with God before us, and we were their offspring after them. What, wilt Thou destroy us for what the vain-doers did?"" (7:172-73) Interpretations of this verse differ, but many authorities maintain that it means that on the day of judgment, people will be held responsible for recognizing the truth of tawhid, whether or not they have heard the message of a prophet. However, they will not be held responsible for the specific teachings of a prophet if such teachings have not reached them."

"Many Muslim thinkers refer to the lost heart by the Koranic term fitra or “original creation.” Fitra is the divine form that God bestowed upon Adam when He created him; or, it is the divine spirit that, according to the Koran, God blew into the clay of Adam in order to bring him to life. Any discussion of “origins” in Islam has everything to do with explaining how God created the universe in stages, beginning with the invisible divine spirit, the breath that God blew into Adam. This spirit is called by many names, such as the First Intelligence, the Supreme Pen, and the Muhammadan Spirit. It is a single reality that is aware of all things and gave Adam his knowledge of all the names, Or, we can say that the First Spirit is the creative command of God, his word “Be!” to all things."

"Every attribute of God is found in the innate disposition (fitra) of the human being. The path to perfection involves bringing these attributes out from hiddenness to manifestation."

"The key to the Islamic intellectual tradition is precisely the intellect, which is nothing but the soul that has come to know and realize its full potential. Inasmuch as the soul possesses this potential, it is often called fitra or innate disposition. If we employ the language of the Qur’an, the fitra is the very self of Adam to whom God “taught all the names” (2:31). It is the primordial Adam present in every human being. At root, it is good and wise, because it inclines naturally toward tawhid, which stands at the heart of all wisdom and forms the basis for the acquisition of true knowledge of God, the universe, and the self."

"To the extent that people fail to actualize their fitra, they remain ignorant of who they are and what the cosmos is. To the degree that they are able to actualize their fitra, they come to understand things in their principles, or in their roots and realities. In other words, they grasp things as they are related to God or as they are known to God. They do not remain staring at phenomena and appearances. Rather, they see with God-given insight into the real names of things. These names subsist eternally in the divine intelligence, which is the spirit that God blew into Adam after having molded his body from clay."

"The human spirit is also God's spirit. The Koran attributes the spirit breathed into Adam to God with the pronouns “His” (32:9) and “My” (15:29, 38:72). Hence this spirit is called the “attributed spirit” (al-ruh al-idafi), i.e., attributed to God, a term which suggests its ambiguous status, both divine and human at once. The spirit possesses all the spiritual or angelic attributes, such as luminosity, subtlety, awareness, and oneness. Clay stands at the opposite pole of the existent cosmos: dark, dense, multiple, dispersed. No connection can be established between the one and the many, the luminous and the dark, without an intermediary, which in man’s case is the soul, the locus of our individual awareness. The spirit is aware of God, though not of anything less than God. But we—at least before we have refined our own souls —have no awareness of the spirit. Clay is unaware of anything at all. The soul, which develops gradually as a human being grows and matures, becomes aware of the world with which it is put in touch in a never-ending process of self discovery and self-finding. Ultimately it may attain to complete harmony with the spirit."

"The primacy of thought is made explicit in the first half of the Shahadah, the testimony of faith: “There is no god but God.” This is the one truth upon which all of Islam depends. The tawhid that is expressed here is not contingent upon the facts and events of the world. It is essentially a thought, a logical and coherent statement about the nature of reality. In the Qur’anic view of things, tawhid guides the thinking of all human beings inasmuch as they are true to their innate disposition (fitra). Every messenger from God came with tawhid in order to remind his own people of their humanity. In this way of looking at things, true thought is far more real than the bodily realm, which is nothing but the apparition of thought. This is not to say that the external world has no objective reality, far from it. It is to say that the universe is born from the consciousness, awareness, and thought of the divine and spiritual realms."

"It should be obvious that by real thought I do not mean the superficial activities of the mind, such as reason, reflective thinking, ideation, cogitation, and logical argumentation. Rather, I mean the very root of human existence, which is consciousness, awareness, and understanding. The Islamic philosophical tradition usually referred to this root as ‘aql, intelligence. Thought in this sense is a spiritual reality that has being and life by definition. In contrast, the bodily realm is essentially dead and evanescent, despite the momentary appearance of life within it. Intelligence is aware, but things and objects are unaware. Intelligence is active, but things are passive. Intelligence is living, self-conscious, and dynamic, but things are empty of these qualities in themselves. In its utmost purity, intelligence is simply the shining light of the living God, a light that bestows existence, life, and consciousness on the universe. It is the creative command whereby God brought the universe into being, the spirit that God blew into Adam after having molded his clay, and the divine speech that conveys to Adam the names of all things."

"To lose the ability to see with the eye of tawhid means to fall into seeing with the eye of shirk, or associating other gods with God. If the Qur’an considers unrepented shirk the one unforgivable sin, this is no doubt because it entails an utter distortion of human understanding, a corruption of the human fitra, and an obscuration of the intelligence that is innate to every human being."

"The growth of the human soul, the process whereby it moves from darkness to light, is also a growth from death to life (hayat), ignorance to knowledge (‘ilm), listlessness to desire (irada), weakness to power (qudra), dumbness to speech (kalam), meanness to generosity (jud), and wrongdoing to justice (qist). In each case the goal is the actualization of a divine attribute in the form of which man was created, but which remains a relative potentiality as long as man does not achieve it fully. All the “states” and “stations” mentioned earlier can be seen as stages in the process of actualizing one or more of the divine names."

"On the one hand, human beings return to God by the same invisible route followed by other creatures. They are born, they live, they die, and they are gone, no one knows where. The same thing happens to a bee or an oak tree. This is what Ibn al-‘Arabi and others call the “compulsory return” (ruju idtirari) to God. Whether we like it or not, we will travel that route. “O man, you are laboring toward your Lord laboriously, and you shall encounter Him!” (Koran 84:6). On the other hand human beings possess certain gifts which allow them to choose their own route of return (this is the “voluntary return,” ruju ikhtiyari). Man can follow the path laid down by this prophet or that, or he can follow his own “caprice” (hawa) and whims. Each way takes him back to God, but God has many faces, not all of them pleasant to meet. “Whithersoever you turn, there is the Face of God” (2:115), whether in this world or the next."

"Another's estimate has never the rich completeness of the sudden word from the inner self."

"...of poetry as daily fare-of poetry as being as much the daily bread as the white hyacinths of life."

"There is nothing to be afraid of in the name of poetry, though it is in all languages and in all ages a name for wisdom and beauty. Whether we know it or not, poetry is a part of the everyday life of all of us. It is about us, and inside us, all the time. More often than not, we do not recognize it. Even when it is most present, we may not realize that what we are seeing or hearing or even saying is poetry. But we can learn to recognize and realize it: and to the extent to which we may do so, we ourselves become poets. In an essay familiar to most high-school students, Carlyle declared that everyone who reads a poem understandingly becomes a co-creator of the poem, and so a poet. We are creators in greater degree; and, therefore, poets the more, when we open our eyes and ears and minds to the innumerable little things as well as the big things that make life."

"This working partnership of facts and imagination gives us reality, which I think is another word of poetry. I do not believe that poetry can ever be anything but truth. When poetry speaks in parables, or in metaphors or in similes, it is not to lead you away from what is real to what is unreal, but rather to lead you by the quickest path to the very core of reality. Poetry does not give us fanciful falsehood instead of truth: poetry is a shorthand for truth itself. When we depart from truth, we depart from poetry."

"It is poetry to express an entire philosophy in simple words"

"For the world, which seems so various, is made up to a large extent of a few patterns used over and over again in innumerable combinations. We need not falsify in order to find the identities. We need only to look with comprehending eyes. Poetry is this recognition, and expression, of identities. The common words of our language, and of the language of every other people, is full of such poetry..."

"The lack of understanding that comes from actual ignorance is notorious. Most North Americans know nothing even of Puerto Rico, which has been under the Stars and Stripes for thirty years; so it is hardly surprising that they are apt to confuse Uruguay with Uganda."

"Science of course is the great international bond."

"Translators, again-the most abused and patient lot of folk on earth-are helpful in making us better acquainted; though we hope the time will soon come when citizens of the twenty-one republics will no longer need translators. There is no reason for our not speaking each other's language."

"Puerto Rico is Spanish American in its past, Anglo-Saxon in its present, and, I trust, in the deepest sense Pan-American in its future"

"Many temples have been built to shelter Pan-Americanism. Some of them have been built with marble, some with words. But deep and true friendship is no less than beautiful. It does not come even to temples merely because it is summoned, nor even because each country of our continents may sincerely desire its coming. International friendship to be real must be unselfish, and complete unselfishness is hard of attainment when interests differ; as hard for nations as for individuals. But here, today, you have before your eyes a concrete demonstration of that very thing: a Pan-Americanism that includes all, that excludes none, that makes not the slightest difference between one and another. The women of all the Americas have one need. Every enlightened woman of this hemisphere desires for her sister of another country, the same good which she craves for herself. The woman of no country of our Americas believes that equal rights for herself will in any way give her or her country an advantage over her sisters to the north or to the south. She does not wish such advantage. She does not ask for one thing and pay with another; she is not carrying on a barter of power, of friendship, of advantage. She asks for herself and for every other woman in all of our countries, one thing, for the good of all-and for the good of those countries which we women have helped upbuild and are helping uphold."

"Our petition as women, amongst you free citizens of Pan America, is like the petition of my Puerto Rico in the community of American States. We have everything done for us and given us but sovereignty. We are treated with every consideration save the one great consideration of being regarded as responsible beings. We, like Puerto Rico, are dependents. We are anomalies before the law. We, the women of the Americas, ask for a treaty granting us equal rights before the law. We ask this not for one woman, not for one country, not for one race, but for the women of Pan America, for the women who are proving to you here today by their solidarity and mutual trust that Pan-Americanism is a fact. We offer you a new definition: Pan-Americanism is the deep desire of every country for the common good of all, favoring none and slighting none. It is the oneness of purpose that makes of us all responsible citizens of the spiritual commonwealth of Pan America. We offer you a definition and we offer you an opportunity; the opportunity of acting with unparalleled generosity and vision. We, the women of America, ask of you, the men of America, a treaty guaranteeing us our equal human rights."

"a visionary and fervent Pan-Americanist...one of the most extraordinary and creative figures of the twentieth century, a builder of bridges and hopes...a magnificent woman.'"

"What I keep thinking is: why didn't I know about you? I have needed you and I didn't know. I grew up in the Puerto Rican independence movement, in a home full of books, speaking English and knowing other families who did, pacifists, university people, circles you would have moved through. I am a poet, a translator, a feminist historian studying women's resistance, women's voices, and I never heard that Luis Muñoz Marín had a first wife, far less one like you...The world is full of opportunities to be of use, but I believe with you that poetry has a special power to reconnect our severed bonds, and I will practice it, because for myself and also for the world, you have reminded me that poetry is bread."

"He who would know Homer must approach him with an open mind and lend himself to the guidance of the poet himself. He must not come to the study of the poems with a preconceived notion of the processes by which they have come into being, or of philological or archaeological criteria for determining the relative age of this episode or of that. The reconstructed Iliads are all figments of the imagination; the existent poem is a tangible fact. To this extent the unbiassed student starts as a “unitarian.” If he but yields himself to the spell of the poem, he will become the more confirmed in his faith; and though he may find much of the learning of the world arrayed against him, yet he will none the less be standing in a goodly company of those whom the Muse has loved, and will himself have heard the voice of the goddess and looked upon her face."

"The Sumerologist is one of the narrowest of specialists in the highly specialized academic halls of learning, a well-nigh perfect example of the man who "knows mostest about the leastest.""

"So whenever I give a lecture, somebody from the audience gets up and says, "Dr Kramer, ... how do you know how to pronounce these words?" And my answer then is as follows: If one of the dead Sumerians that Leonard Woolley dug up at Ur, if he was miraculously resurrected and came into the room and he heard me say, [speaks Sumerian], he would say: "That man Kramer, he’s doing very well; he’s pronouncing his words and I understand them. But my goodness does he have a Jewish accent.""

"Good writers are an editor's stock in trade (...) You have to treasure them and treat them right."

"I hope this collection [of short stories from French authors] does justice to that variety [of distinctive literary voices]. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad, a few are mysterious. The excerpts may seem to end too soon, but that's all to the good. These pieces are neither bonbons nor full-course meals. They're more like hearty appetizers. You're at a bountiful buffet, and you should feel free to come back for more."

"Food makes history in France, in legend and in fact. (...) But when Charles de Gaulle radioed the French underground that the D-Day invasion was imminent, his message included the key phrase les carottes sont cuites. Literally, this means "the carrots are cooked," and metaphorically "it's all over." What other nation marches to war in the glow of beta carotene?"

"Translating a big book is like getting married: You’re going to spend a long time together. You may put in months weighing each word, often more carefully than the author.""

"Like most translators, I’m a ventriloquist, and I work hard to make people sound like themselves, and not like me."

"[Literary translation work] has all the pleasures of creative writing, and you never have writer’s block."

"My loyalty as a translator is to both the author and the reader, but in a pinch, I try to help the reader."

"The sex scenes were the toughest to translate. Sex is notoriously hard to write about, and no easier to translate. My prose probably falls somewhere between puritanical and pornographic. Maybe sex is just better in French."

"Like it or not, a translator has to take liberties. How many depends on closely the translator hews to the words of the text. I’m on the side of the reader, so I’d never produce a literal, word-for-word translation, however faithful. My goal is always to produce a text so smooth that the reader isn’t aware it’s a translation. It should read like a book that Mathieu would have written if he were more fluent in English. So I occasionally take liberties, especially with jokes, slang, and idioms. But thanks to email, I can run my textual sins by the author before committing them to paper. Even after some forty books and screenplays, I still love doing translations."

"(Speaking about his translation work of a diary by Berthe Weill) When it comes to typographical style, Berthe Weill is happily inimitable. She doesn't waste time on line breaks, so passages with a lot of dialogue look like sheets of mud. And she never met an ellipsis she didn't like. French writers use ellipses fairly often, but we avoid them in English because they... look vague... In my early drafts, I eliminated most of the ellipses, but I restored many of them later. That's because Weill's prose rhythm is closer to Machine Gun Kelly than Marcel Proust, and I realized that the ellipses help smoooth out her darting leaps from topic to topic."

"Jokes [are] the bane of every trasnlator's existence."

"Rodarmor's translation is seamless, rendered with that appearance of effortlessness that only the most gifted and painstaking translators can accomplish."

"My grown-up novels have been translated into several languages, but my relationship with my translators has always been limited to a few e-mails to clear up some point or other. With William Rodarmor, all that changed! He started by telephoning me to introduce himself, and we very quickly built a relationship of trust. And he got passionately involved with the text, wanting to know everything about everything, including somewhat remote elements of the historical context that would better enable him to understand this or that detail. He literally bombarded me with messages and sometimes tracked me to my lair, because he wound up knowing the book better than I did! And he managed it all with great humor."

"As a writer de Villiers had a serious shortcoming: The man could not write. (...) Indeed his French prose is so mechanical, so flat and so replete with Franglais. (...) William Rodarmor's English translation of Madmen is actually better than the original."

"For anyone living in Paris, the Algerian war was inescapable."

"In the 60s, we had the impression that what we did could have an impact"

"We felt that we were on the edge of a new world. It was the end of colonialism; the Cold War had only begun."

"I organized the international conference in Accra, and as a result I met these people from all around the world."

"Our role was to convince the world that Algeria had to be independent and France had to stop this crazy war"

"How we did it I really don’t know, but it came off and it was a beautiful event"

"I stayed on after the coup that brought Houari Boumediene to power in 1965"

"This book fills a much-needed gap."

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it."

"It is perhaps not an accident that stories often end with a marriage, since this provides a specifically dramatic conclusion that serves to gather together the infinite opposition of personalities into a single form. The fact that those who marry in so many traditional fairy tales disappear from the narrative into an implicit "happily ever after" perhaps betrays a sense deeply rooted in human culture that freedom and form belong together."

"Instead of enjoyment, there is labor, instead of goods, there are uses, instead of substance, we have property, instead of property, we have money, instead of bonds, we have boundaries, instead of connection, we have contract, instead of order, we have regulation, and so forth. Locke's political theory represents a conquest of the ordering principle of human life, which then allows that principle to retain its rule only if it changes its meaning."

"Locke does not deny the existence of God or the truth of religion; indeed, he affirms these as indispensable, to the extent that atheists have to be excluded from toleration. What Locke does deny, ... is the actuality ... of any concrete, historical form that religion might take. But of course a religion cannot exist except concretely in history. If a religion, which means the effective manifestation of ultimate meaning, exists concretely in history, it necessarily makes a claim on me prior to my act of will, because it makes a claim on everything without exception. To recognize this claim is to see that actuality precedes potency, and if this is true ultimately, it will be true, so to speak, all the way down. And this will mean that freedom will necessarily have to be interpreted as sharing in actuality, a response to the good that precedes me and makes my choice of it possible; the actualizing of the will in this case comes to mean being brought into an actual world, a tradition, and a hierarchy of goods. Actual religion is therefore incompatible with an interpretation of freedom primarily as active power. Locke can affirm freedom as power only by transforming at the same time the status of religion. It can no longer be a single truth that precedes political agents, but it has to become an array of possibilities, any one of which individuals are free to accept, at least within the constraints of political order. Within these constraints, I am permitted to affirm any religion as true, and practice it thus in public, as long as I recognize that this has a new meaning that would strike an ancient thinker as confusing, if not simply confused: it is true "for me." Notice that the potentializing of religion in this way allows one to neutralize the implications of the existence of God without having to shoulder the burden of responsibility that would come with rejecting God outright. In short, the precondition for the emergence of the modern concept of freedom is not the denial of God, but the denial of his actual self-revelation in history. Modern liberty, at its core, is a rejection specifically of the incarnation, God's coming in the flesh."

"For all of their differences, Locke, Spinoza, and Kant ... share a common core in their conception of freedom, which we may justly characterize in general as "modern liberty": a view of freedom as spontaneous and unconditioned causality, or as active power that produces effects as a result of self-originating energy rather than receiving determination from outside of itself. What we wish to suggest ... is that such a conception of freedom, because it relentlessly separates potentiality from actuality, represents, in its depths, a flight from reality."

"Because man has no relationship with anything—other people, the world, God—that is not mediated at some level through the will, a reinterpretation of the meaning of the will and its freedom will inevitably be what Nietzsche called a "revaluation of all values." What is at issue is not simply a new hierarchy of values, a replacement of higher values by things previously held in lower esteem, but indeed a transformation of what it means to value and be valuable tout court, ... a transformation of the meaning of goodness and its principal mode of manifestation. It has been said that Darwin's late modern interpretation of evolution stands as a "universal acid": the inner logic of his idea eats away at all other traditional ideas, not only on the biological level but also on all levels of human existence; it dissolves everything in its wake. One might say that the notion of modern liberty we are discussing is even more radical and therefore more subtle in its effects. It is not so much an acid as a sort of alchemical reagent. Instead of dissolving things, it leaves them standing, but eliminates their original essence, their native goodness, transforming realities into gold—that is, a conventional representation of value without any organic relation to its own given nature. There is nothing at all left untouched by this transformation."

"This is the heart of the diabolical: an image that is not an image, but presents itself as the real thing—indeed, in a certain sense, as better than the real thing precisely because of the immediacy or the lack of transcendence that the dissemblance implies."

"Contradiction constitutes the diabolical. ... The diabolical presents as essential what it simultaneously denies or renders impossible, so that we could say that it is the very essence of the diabolical, ontologically considered, to make "empty promises." The diabolical proffers an object of desire while at the same time undermining the conditions under which that object could be attained in actuality. It is not only perverse; it is perversity itself, because its turning toward what is other than itself is in fact nothing more than a turning toward itself. This is what we have meant by saying that it points in two directions at the same time: δια-βάλλω. The essential per-versity of the diabolical comes perhaps most intensely to light in the fact that it is, so to speak, precisely the nature of the diabolical to present just itself as the solution to the problem that it itself generates."

"Nietzsche represents an attempt to recover the "self-diffusiveness" of the good in spite of the good itself, because the good itself cannot be separated from the Christian Neoplatonic tradition that lies at the roots of Western civilization. He thus ends up, as Heidegger has compellingly shown, with an emptiness of the will to power, sheer willing, which does not overcome modernity but rather consummates it."

"Ours is a decidedly non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical, age. This is not to say that we lack "philosophers," of a certain sort; indeed, we have only too many. ... While it may be the case that our age is more cerebral, more abstract, more preoccupied with brain power, with intellectual capacities and skills, than any other age in history, it remains true that we are not philosophical. Indeed, our very abstraction and preoccupation with intelligence is a sign of the "forgetfulness" of philosophy."

"We will not pursue the question here about ... whether it is in fact possible to find some objective standard for judgments of taste once one has interpreted beauty essentially as an event in the brain. Indeed, if beauty is nothing more than a subjective feeling of pleasure, which occurs under certain conditions, then the question concerning objective standards loses any real urgency. It seems to me that, if the question was still posed with such zeal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is due to a lingering sense that beauty is in fact something important, more than the mere turning of a screw in our mental machinery. If this is true, then the fact that people today seem less inclined to fight about judgments of taste, and show little interest in persuading others about what is beautiful, or learning to make good judgments, educating and forming their tastes, is something that should cause us great alarm. Our alarm ought to grow exponentially if it is in fact true that the way we experience and interpret beauty reveals an understanding of or disposition towards reality in general. In this case, to lose a sense of beauty's connection to reality is, I suggest, to lose a sense of the reality of reality tout court."

"It was the nature of the thing: No moon outlives its leaving night, No sun its day. And I went on Rich in the loss of all I sing To the threshold of waking light, To larksong and the live, gray dawn. So night by night, my life has gone."

"In darkness and in hedges I sang my sour tone and all my love was howling conspicuously alone."

"Up the reputable walks of old established trees They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing."

"Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama; Aged in wrong, the empires are declining, And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence. What shall I say to the young on such a morning?— Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?— No; my little ones lean not toward revolt."

"They wear their godhead lightly. They look out from their hill and say, To themselves, "We have nowhere to go but down; The great destination is to stay.""

"The sleek, expensive girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of reach."

"I haven't read one book about A book or memorized one plot. Or found a mind I did not doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot. And one by one the solid scholars Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars."

"I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying."

"I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die."

"Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives, We shall afford our costly seasons; There is a gentleness survives That will outspeak and has its reasons. There is a loveliness exists, Preserves us, not for specialists."

"I happened to find Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold, Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard Who has turned up a severed hand."

"—Before we drained out one another’s force With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still, I put back your picture. Someday, in due course, I will find that it’s still there."

"After experience taught me that all the ordinary Surroundings of social life are futile and vain;"

"You must call up every strength you own And you can rip off the whole facial mask."

"And you, whiner, who wastes your time Dawdling over the remorseless earth, What evil, what unspeakable crime Have you made your life worth?"

"You seem to be all finished, so We'll plug your old recalcitrant anus And tie up your discouraged penis In a great, snow-white bow of gauze."

"—All this Dark Age machinery On which we had tormented you To life."

"You still whispered you would not die. Yet the nights I heard you cry Like a whipped child;"

"Is it, then, your opinion Women are putty in your hands? Is this the face to launch upon A thousand one night stands?"

"Where, where is the long, flowing hair, The velvet suit, the broad bow tie; Where is the other-worldly air, Where the abstracted eye?"

"Where are the beard, the bongo drums, Tattered T-shirt and grubby sandals, As who, released from Iowa, comes To tell of wondrous scandals?"

"Have you subversive, out of date, Or controversial ideas?"

"Ah, what avails the tenure race, Ah, what the Ph.D., When all departments have a place For nincompoops like thee?"

"Four hundred years ago the Bible of England was the . Few men could read it, and fewer women. For knowledge of it ordinary people were dependent upon the clergy, who were themselves none too well acquainted with its meaning. It was at such a time that a young Oxford man, William Tyndale, undertook the task of making a translation of the New Testament directly from the into the , and thus laid the foundation of the . The disfavor with which the medieval church regarded the circulation of the Bible among the people had found expression in a regulation of the , passed in 1229 , that no layman should be allowed to have any book of the Bible, especially in a translation, except perhaps the ."

"Not a few of the experienced times of , when in s they felt themselves in the very presence of God, heard him speak, and saw celestial realities."

"Devotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the : the public reception of professor Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation (1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization."

"Here come the old original Thirteen! Sir Walter ushers in the Virgin Queen; Catholic Mary follows her, whose land Smiles on soft Chesapeake from either strand; Then Georgia, with the sisters Caroline,— One the palmetto wears, and one the pine; Next, she who ascertained the rights of men Not by the sword but by the word of Penn,— The friendly language hers, of "thee" and "thou"; Then, she whose mother was a thrifty vrouw,— Mother herself of princely children now; And, sitting at her feet, the sisters twain,— Two smaller links in the Atlantic chain, They, through those long dark winters, drear and dire, Watched with our Fabius round the bivouac fire; Comes the free mountain maid, in white and green; One guards the Charter Oak with lofty mien; And lo! in the plain beauty once she wore, The pilgrim mother from the Bay State shore; And last, not least, is Little Rhody seen, With face turned heavenward, steadfast and serene,— She on her anchor, Hope, leans, and will ever lean."

"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there."

"Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home."

"This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all."

"There is a community of the spirit Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street, and being the noise."

"Quit acting like a wolf, and feel the shepherd's love filling you."

"Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being."

"What is the body? That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe."

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about language, ideas, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense."

"Spring is Christ, Raising martyred plants from their shrouds. Their mouths open in gratitude, wanting to be kissed. The glow of the rose and the tulip means a lamp is inside. A leaf trembles. I tremble in the wind-beauty like silk from Turkestan. The censer fans into flame. This wind is the Holy Spirit. The trees are Mary."

"We talk about this and that. There’s no rest except on these branching moments."

"There is no reality but God, says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings."

"Disputational knowing wants customers. It has no soul."

"Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be."

"I can't stop pointing to the beauty.Every moment and place says, "Put this design in your carpet!""

"From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions, but I became something hungrier than a lion."

"This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you. Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul. There's no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence but that existence."

"The place that Solomon made to worship in, called the Far Mosque, is not built of earth and water and stone, but of intention and wisdom and mystical conversation and compassionate action."

"This heart sanctuary does exist, but it can't be described. Why try! Solomon goes there every morning and gives guidance with words, with musical harmonies, and in actions, which are the deepest teaching. A prince is just a conceit until he does something with generosity."

"Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being."

"Do not believe in an absurdity no matter who says it."

"Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river.When the ocean is searching for you, don't walk into the language-river. Listen to the ocean, and bring your talky business to an endTraditional words are just babbling in that presence, and babbling is a substitute for sight."

"Every object and being in the universe is a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth more shining, as though covered in satin."

"You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open."

"Christ is the population of the world, and every object as well. There is no room for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing when sweet water is everywhere?"

"Lovers think they are looking for each other, but there is only one search: wandering This world is wandering that, both inside one transparent sky. In here there is no dogma and no heresy."

"The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did about the future. Forget the future. I'd worship someone who could do that."

"The cure for pain is in the pain. Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both, you don't belong with us."

"It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home."

"Learn from Ali how to fight without your ego participating. God's lion did nothing that didn't originate from his deep center."

"I am God's Lion, not the lion of passion.... I have no longing except for the One. When a wind of personal reaction comes, I do not go along with it. There are many winds full of anger, and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around, but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it's always been."

"This that we are now created the body, cell by cell, like bees building a honeycomb.The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and the human body."

"Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."

"Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still."

"God's joy moved from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell."

"Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don't claim them. Feel the artistry moving through, and be silent."

"Come to the orchard in Spring. There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter."

"He says, "There’s nothing left of me. I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise. Is it still a stone, or a world made of redness? It has no resistance to sunlight."This is how Hallaj said, I am God, and told the truth!The ruby and the sunrise are one. Be courageous and discipline yourself.Completely become hearing and ear, and wear this sun-ruby as an earring."

"To Love is to reach God. Never will a Lover's chest feel any sorrow. Never will a Lover's robe be touched by mortals. Never will a Lover's body be found buried in the earth. To Love is to reach God."

"When in Love, body, mind, heart and soul don't even exist."

"Love rests on no foundation. It is an endless ocean, with no beginning or end."

"They will ask you what you have produced. Say to them, except for Love, what else can a Lover produce?"

"My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown. My heart is expanding a thousand fold. Every cell, taking wings, flies about the world. All seek separately the many faces of my Beloved."

"There is a certain cloud, impregnated with a thousand lightnings. There is my body, in it an ocean formed of his glory, all the creation, all the universes, all the galaxies, are lost in it."

"I always thought that I was me — but no, I was you and never knew it."

"This is a gathering of Lovers. In this gathering there is no high, no low, no smart, no ignorant, no special assembly, no grand discourse, no proper schooling required. There is no master, no disciple. This gathering is more like a drunken party, full of tricksters, fools, mad men and mad women. This is a gathering of Lovers."

"Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent."

"I don't know where I am. At times I plunge to the bottom of the sea, at times, rise up like the Sun.At times, the universe is pregnant by me, at times I give birth to it."

"A hundred souls cried out, but we are yours, we are yours, we are yours. You are the light that spoke to Moses and said I am God, I am God, I am God. I said Shams-e Tabrizi, who are you? He said, I am you, I am you, I am you."

"Even if you lose yourself in wrath for a hundred thousand years, at the end you will discover, it is me, who is the culmination of your dreams."

"Didn't I tell you not to be satisfied with the veil of this world? I am the master illusionist, it is me, who is the welcoming banner at the gate of your contentment."

"Didn't I tell you? I am an ocean, you are a fish; do not go to the dry land, it is me, who is your comforting body of water."

"Didn't I tell you? They will accuse you of all the wrongdoings, they will call you ugly names, they will make you forget it is me, who is the source of your happiness."

"Love is best when mixed with anguish. In our town, we won't call you a Lover if you escape the pain. Look for Love in this way, welcome it to your soul, and watch you spirit fly away in ecstasy."

"I am so drunk I have lost the way in and the way out. I have lost the earth, the moon, and the sky. Don't put another cup of wine in my hand, pour it in my mouth, for I have lost the way to my mouth."

"Everyday my heart falls deeper in the pain of your sorrow. Your cruel heart is weary of me already. You have left me alone, yet your sorrow remains. Truly your sorrow is more faithful than you are."

"I wanted to hear Sappho’s laughter and the speech of her stringed shell.What I heard was whiskered mumble- ment of grammarians:Greek pterodactyls and Victorian dodos."

"Dapple-throned Aphrodite, eternal daughter of God, snare-knitter!"

"Some say a cavalry corps, some infantry, some, again, will maintain that the swift oars of our fleet are the finest sight on dark earth; but I say that whatever one loves, is."

"Like a hyacinth in the mountains, trampled by shepherds until only a purple stain remains on the ground."

"Hesperus, you herd homeward whatever Dawn’s light dispersedYou herd sheep—herd goats—herd children home to their mothers."

"The memory of one who is taken into the heart of a little child is kept forever green."

"The hunter catches a dreadful prey, the seaman steers his ship into an unspeakable harbor, the plowman sows and reaps a fearful harvest, the investigator finds the criminal and the judge convicts him—they are all the same man—the revealer turns into the thing revealed, the finder into the thing found, the calculator finds he is himself the solution of the equation and the physician discovers that he is the disease. The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on to this terrible discovery of his fundamental ignorance—he is not the measure of all things but the thing measured and found wanting."

"You are the king no doubt, but in one respect, at least, I am your equal: the right to reply. I claim that privilege too. I am not your slave. I serve Apollo. I don't need Creon to speak for me in public. So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you're blind to the corruption in your life, to the house you live in, those you live with— who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father's curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light! Soon, soon, you'll scream aloud—what haven won't reverberate? What rock of Cithaeron won't scream back in echo? That day you learn the truth about your marriage, the wedding-march that sang you into your halls, the lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor! And a crowd of other horrors you'd never dream will level you with yourself and all your children. There. Now smear us with insults—Creon, myself and every word I've said. No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you."

"When Hector heard that challenge he rejoiced and right in the no man's land along his lines he strode, gripping his spear mid-haft, staving men to a standstill while Agamemnon seated his Argives geared for combat. And Apollo lord of the silver bow and Queen Athena, for all the world like carrion birds, like vultures, slowly settled atop the broad towering oak sacred to Zeus whose battle-shield is thunder, relishing those men."