shorts

❦ To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.
~ B. Brecht

❦ Q: Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? A: Because the P is silent.

❦ There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.
~ A. Hitchcock

❦ It is a foolish goose that comes to a fox’s sermon.
~ 16th century proverb

❦ Poetry = the practice of subtlety in a barbaric world.
~ R. Barthes, in his final lecture series

❦ You ask about the effect my work has on others. If I may speak ironically, that’s a masculine question. Men always want to be influential. I see that somewhat as an onlooker. Do I see myself as influential? No. I want to understand.
~ H. Arendt

❦ How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like a solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
~ V. Woolf, The Waves

❦ The world is just a little place, just the red in the sky, before the sun rises, so let us keep fast hold of hands, that when the birds begin, none of us be missing.
~ E. Dickinson, letter of 1860

❦ Don’t forget that although a poem is composed in the language of communication, it’s not used in the language-game of communication.
~ L. Wittgenstein

❦ A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
~ W. James

❦ One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers.
~ M. Tsvetaeva