Young people may regret tomorrow what they make public today but I think we will all be protected by the doctrine of mutually assured humiliation (I won’t dig up your college-party picture if you don’t dig up mine).
Jeff Jarvis, “Openness and the Internet,” BusinessWeek (via somethingchanged)
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and the sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
Ernest Hemingway in Esquire, December 1934 (via 52books)
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4 (via crookedtooth)
So much of what passed for political coverage last night was like watching a manure spreader in a windstorm.
Ludwig von Feuerbach was a nineteenth-century atheist who curiously declared that God did not make us, but rather we made God as a figment of our imagination.
Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and…. suffering.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (via charlesgomes)
The artists of the past all had their rebellion. Elvis was rebelling against sexual repression, and Dylan was rebelling against immorality, and I feel like I’m rebelling against technology and the death of romance.
Jack White
(so much to love!){A}
(via papertowngirl)
America is no longer a Christian nation… that seems to be the top phrase for some politicians today, even with nearly 4 out of every 5 Americans claiming to be a Christian. And of course in Britain, Richard Dawkins helped support a wide-spread advertising campaign on buses, stating there’s “probably no God,” even though a recent census stated that nearly 70% of Britains claimed to be Christians.
[sf]
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
George Orwell (via eightfiveoh)
language matters… language is not merely descriptive. it’s creative.
Nobody killed poetry. Guys like Epstein… hearken back to some dreamland America in which people got up in the morning and opened their windows to the birds singing and when they felt their souls elevated they recited American poetry to the waiting world. Bullshit!
Philip Levine (via the blog poetic)
Performance poetry is not for everyone…. Poetry is a broad church, the natural partner of humour as well as intensity, love and grief as much as short girls and text messages. As Don Paterson, two-times winner of the TS Eliot prize, puts it: “Poetry is a basic function of language, not an operation we perform on it. It’s the way language renews itself, whenever it’s both emotionally charged and short of time. As long as we speak, there will be poetry.
Iain Hollingshead, Standing up for pure poetry (via)
quomodo omnia nobis divinae virtutis suae quae ad vitam et pietatem donata est per cognitionem eius qui vocavit nos propria gloria et virtute
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright
(via sharlala)
(via thomasfitzpatrick)
When I launched my own Web site two years ago, I wanted visitors not only to learn about me and my work but also to hear my poetry—in my own voice. I wanted the music of my poems, intimate and aspirant, to reach my would-be readers in that sacred place where the eardrum’s rhythms pound with the heart’s heat.
Todd Boss, Poets & Writers, The Audio Revolution: How to Amplify Your Poems
So which is better: to reveal or not to reveal? It remains an open question.
A. S. Maulucci, On Poetry: Poet’s personal life has no bearing on his or her work
I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.
Franz Wright (via post-gazette.com)
The good thing about rats is they don’t lie. Cross a gecko with a mussel and what you have is a new kind of adhesive tape.
Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan, (via)
life is too short to live without poetry…
Omnis voluntarius et prono animo offerat eas Domino
We don’t take [poets] seriously; we don’t think that poetry can move people to do passionate things. But poets did. Poets could change cultures. Before there was so much contest for people’s attention, poets were the ones who literally brought the news from one place to another, walking from town to town, which is how we got everything to be iambic and memorable and rhymed and metered, because the tradition was oral before it was literary.
People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in a world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Letters and Social Aims 1876 (via 52books)
dullness has its virtue…
the economist, the week ahead podcast
vitam et pietatem
Coffeehouse Junkie 