Catholics From The United States

"Down through the tomb's inward arch He has shouldered out into Limbo to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber..."

"You are the stream, the fish, the light, the pulsing shadow. You the unchanging presence, in whom all moves and changes. How can I focus my flickering, perceive at the fountain's heart the sapphire I know is there?"

"Not for one second will my self hold still, but wanders anywhere, everywhere it can turn. Not you, it is I am absent."

"Lord, not you, it is I who am absent."

"He himself must be the key, now, to the next door, the next terrors of freedom and joy."

"And not till he saw the angel had left him, alone and free to resume the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of what he had still to do, not till then did he recognize this was no dream."

"Delivered out of raw continual pain, smell of darkness, groans of those others to whom he was chained — unchained, and led past the sleepers, door after door silently opening — out!"

"I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'."

"pure dust that is all in all. Bless, weightless Spirit. Drink Caliban, push your tongue heavy into the calyx."

"Let Ariel learn a blessing for Caliban and Caliban drink dew from the lotus open upon the waters."

"Leaps of nerve, heart — cries of communion: if there is bliss, it has been already and will be; out- reaching, utterly. Blind to itself, flooded with otherness."

"all of us know he means we mustn't, any of us, lose touch with the source, pretend it's not there, cover over the mineshaft of passion"

"The poet never must lose despair."

"I am not joking. I'm speaking of spirit. Not dogma but spirit. The Way."

"To serve the people, one must write for the ideal reader. Only for the ideal reader. And who or what is that ideal reader? God. One must imagine, One must deeply imagine"

"To me it seems perhaps Kropotkin understood half of what we need to know, and Lenin perhaps knew half, and true revolution … true revolution must put these two halves together?"

"There is a fence around the garden but the gate stands open."

"The wind, the birds, do not sound poorer but clearer, recalling our agony, and the way we danced."

"Perhaps he will not return. But what we have lived comes back to us. We see more. We feel, as our rings increase, something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest leaf-tips further."

"It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost what he sought. It is said they felled him and cut up his limbs for firewood. And it is said his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing."

"By dawn he was gone. We have stood here since, in our new life. We have waited. He does not return."

"The music reached us. Clumsily, stumbling over our own roots, rustling our leaves in answer, we moved, we followed."

"And I in terror but not in doubt of what I must do in anguish, in haste, wrenched from the earth root after root, the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder — and behind me the others: my brothers forgotten since dawn. In the forest they too had heard, and were pulling their roots in pain out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves, rolling the rocks away, breaking themselves out of their depths."

"Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames. New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer. As though his lyre (now I knew its name) were both frost and fire, its chords flamed up to the crown of me. I was seed again. I was fern in the swamp. I was coal."

"He told of journeys, of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark, of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day deeper than roots ... He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs, and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed my thick bark would split like a sapling's that grew too fast in the spring when a late frost wounds it."

"Then as he sang it was no longer sounds only that made the music: he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language came into my roots out of the earth, into my bark out of the air, into the pores of my greenest shoots gently as dew and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning."

"I was the first to see him, for I grew out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest. He was a man, it seemed. . ."

"I love them for finding what I can't find,and for loving me for the line I wrote, and for forgetting it so that a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, forassuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all."

"Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.I who don't know the secret wrote the line."

"The world is not with us enough. O taste and see."

"I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glowin the narrow flute from which the morning-glory opens blue and cool on a hot morning."

"I like to find what's not found at once, but lieswithin something of another nature, in repose, distinct."

"Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow."

"I’ve always hated artificial flowers unless they were just flagrantly and beautifully, sort of brassily, artificial. But the good imitations, the ones that you think are real until you get up to them, and then there’s that awful dead plastic, are really vile. And the reason why I think they’re so vile is because so much of the beauty of a flower is in its very perishableness. One doesn’t want it to last forever, and accumulate dust."

"To leave the open fields and enter the forest,that was the rite. Knowing there was mystery, they could go. Go back now! And he receded among the multitude of forms, the twists and shadows they saw now, listening to the hum of the world's wood."

"I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock."

"I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military, and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”"

"Unfortunately, the president's first reaction was not, “How can I protect the troops?” It was, “How can I protect myself?” He issued a Twitter denial that he knew about the bounties, then proceeded to launch irrelevant attacks at former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. As is so often the case with President Trump, the welfare of the nation and of our troops did not come up. This is not what leadership looks like. These are not the actions of someone who serves — or even cares about — the troops to whom he has a duty. These are the actions of a man concerned with self-preservation and little else. President Trump receives well-deserved criticism for failing to serve his country in Vietnam. Yet, given the lack of loyalty to the troops he has displayed in recent months, that might have been for the best."

"Service members' lives demand a strong response. We should be slapping additional sanctions on Russia and freezing the assets of the oligarchs in Russian President Vladimir Putin's circle. We should be stationing more troops in Europe to counter Russia. We should not, as President Trump has done, give Russia a major strategic victory by pulling 9,500 troops out of Germany."

"Fifty years ago, the men I commanded in Vietnam taught me what loyalty meant. I was a captain then, and A Company, 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry of the 1st Infantry Division was my responsibility. My troops and I were on patrol when we encountered a dug-in enemy force, and I was the first man hit — four rounds from an AK-47. I called the men to come forward and they ran forward, under fire and then, when we gained fire superiority, stood up and assaulted the enemy position. The men in my command put their lives on the line: Their courage saved my life. For the rest of my military career, there was no action I would not take to protect the troops in my command. As any good leader would. This is why I find it so galling that, as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, President Donald Trump has done nothing despite the fact Russia has put a bounty on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. That a president would do so little to protect the people to whom he has a sacred obligation is unfathomable. It is a dereliction of his duty as commander in chief, an abandonment of the troops who depend upon him and a betrayal of leadership."

"I'd like to get rid of landmines. I did participate in getting rid of laser blinding weapons. And I was part of the team that put together the agreement...I'd like to get rid of nuclear weapons. But I can't agree with those who say that force has no place in international affairs. It simply does for this country. And I would like to work to make it so that it doesn't..."

"I think the United States military was as humane and careful as it possibly could have been in the Kosovo campaign. But still, civilians died. And I'll always regret that."

"We had a malfunction with a cluster bomb unit, and a couple of grenades fell on a schoolyard, and some, I think three, school children were killed... And two weeks later, I got a letter from a Serb grandfather. He said, “You’ve killed my granddaughter.” He said, “I hate you for this, and I’ll kill you.” And I got this in the middle of the war. And it made me very, very sad. We certainly never wanted to do anything like that. But in war, accidents happen. And that's why you shouldn't undertake military operations unless every other alternative has been exhausted, because innocent people do die."

"If you want to talk about tragedies, how about this one? We bombed what we thought was a Serb police station in Kosovo... we found that there were Serb police vehicles parked there at night, so we sent an F-16 in, dropped two 500-pound laser-guided bombs and took it out. We killed 80 Albanians who had been imprisoned by the Serbs there. They were trying to escape, and the Serbs locked them up in this farmhouse... So, I regret every single innocent person who died, and I prayed every night that there wouldn't be any innocent people who died. But this is why I say you must use force only as a last resort."

"These discussions with the Palestinians.... this administration has failed to lead. They came into office basically determined not to do anything that Bill Clinton did. I think that was the basic guideline. And so, they have allowed unremitting violence between Israel and the Palestinians with hardly an effort to stop that through U.S. leadership."

"The truth is, about the Middle East is, had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa. Nobody is threatening to intervene in Africa. The problem is the opposite. We keep asking for people to intervene and stop it. There's no question that the presence of petroleum throughout the region has sparked great power involvement."

"People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East."

"I think it's [torture] a violation of international law and a violation of American law and a violation of the principles of good government in America. There have always been evidences of mistreatment of prisoners... George Washington told his soldiers... “No, treat them well.” He said, “They’ll join our side.” And many of them did. It was a smart policy, not only the right thing to do, but a smart policy to treat the enemy well. We've made countless enemies in that part of the world by the way we've treated people and disregarded them. It's bad, bad policy."

"Well, I'm sure there are a lot of reasons why John would go back to the State Department. John's a good — he's a good man. But, you know, the question is, in government is, can you — are you bigger than your job? Because if you're not bigger than your job, you get trapped by the pressures of events and processes into going along with actions that you know you shouldn't."

"Do you remember that there was going to be a study released by the Senate, that the senator from Iowa or from Kansas who was the Republican head of the Senate Intelligence Committee was going to do this study to determine whether the administration had, in fact, misused the intelligence information to mislead us into the war with Iraq? Well, I've never seen that study. I'd like to know where that study is. I'd like to know why we've spent three years investigating Scooter Libby, when we should have been investigating why this country went to war in Iraq."