Tagged: quote

The great Jim Harrison

minstrel“Poetry does this to us. You can quickly either soar or drown in depression. You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that’s why it’s often a struggle to end a poem. Some are lost forever. Sometimes you walk around with versions of a poem in your head and it won’t come clean. You are enslaved to this language of disorder and can brood upon it for days and weeks. When the poem finally does work, your spirit soars and you forget the difficulty, like you forget pain afterward. Some of the extreme behaviour you see in the poet species is likely attributable to these struggles. When the brain spends this much time enfevered it is liable to affect the behaviour which for a long period was a common joke around academia.”

Jim Harrison,  The Ancient Minstrel (2016)

Quote of the day: Charles Eisenstein

“We are only able to continue our ravaging of the planet under the cover of pretense. How is it that we as a society take no action, when the awful artifacts of our way of life on this planet lay strewn all around us? How is it that we continue to hurtle toward an obvious abyss? It is only because we have been rendered blind and insensate. Underneath their numbers games, the banks and hedge funds are stripping wealth away from the masses and the planet. Behind every profit statement, behind every executive bonus, is a trail of wreckage: strip mines, debt slaves, pension cuts, hungry children, ruined lives, and ruined places. We all participate in this system, but can do so willingly only to the extent we do not feel, see, or know. To conduct a revolution of love, we must reconnect with the reality of our system and its victims. When we tear away the ideologies, the labels, and the rationalizations, we show ourselves the truth of what we are doing, and conscience awakens.”

-Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

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Ye Quote of the Day

serge:mugshot“I have found that the writer cannot even exist in our decomposing modern societies without accommodating himself to interests that forcibly limit his horizons and mutilate his sincerity.”

Victor Serge,  Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Quote of the day–Max Ernst

Ernst:Man Ray“…my roamings, my restlessness, my impatience, my doubts, my beliefs, my hallucinations, my loves, my fits of anger, my revolts, my contradictions, my refusal to submit to any discipline including my own…have not created a climate conducive to a serene and smiling life’s work.”

Max Ernst

Quote of the day

From Kurt Vonnegut’s introduction to Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons:

“This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades:  They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence.  They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.”