"Commonplace-book. Formerly Book of common places. orig. A book in which 'commonplaces' or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement." From The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. First usage recorded: 1578.
March 10, 2008
"I am from my grandma's bedroom
From friendly cats, from scarves and shawls
I am from my pop pop's pancakes
With smiley faces and syrup"
Excerpt from the poem "where I'm from" by my niece, Alicia
December 20, 2007
And Mary said: "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord." Luke 1:46
Merry Christmas!!!
January 18, 2004
"Before modern science, human cultures were oriented toward maintaining and enhancing the received wisdom of the past. But within modern times, doubt has arisen as to whether any wisdom of any past is worth salvaging. Modern science and its technologies have left us cynical about the value of anything in the past tense."
Thomas C. Oden, from The Rebirth of Orthodoxy
"The Americans who call themselves "Conservatives" have the right to the title only in a particular sense. In fact, they are old-fashioned liberals. They stand for the freedom of the individual to use his property as he wishes, and for a limited government which must keep out of the marketplace. Their concentration on freedom from governmental interference has more to do with nineteenth-century liberalism than with traditional convervatism, which asserts the right of the community to restrain freedom in the name of the common good. Senator Goldwater appealed directly to the American Constitution and to Locke, its philosophical architect. The Senator's chief economic adviser, Professor Milton Friedman, appeals to the British liberal economists of the nineteenth century. They are "conservatives" only in terms of the short history of their own country. They claim that the authentic American tradition went off the rails with the mass liberalism of the New Deal and should return to the individualism of the founding fathers. The makers of the Constitution took their philosophy from the first wave of modernity; the spirit of the New Deal belonged to the later waves of liberalism. In this sense, Goldwater is an American conservative. But what he conserves is the liberal philosophy of Locke. The founders of the United States took their thought from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Their rallying cry was "freedom." There was no place in their cry for the organic conservatism that pre-dated the age of progress. Indeed, the United States is the only society on earth that has no traditions from before the age of progress. Their "right-wing" and "left-wing" are just different species of liberalism. "Freedom" was the slogan of both Goldwater and President Johnson."
--George Grant, from Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism.
"Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value. If it is taken seriously, the writing of it becomes a criminal act."
Ezra Pound, from ABC of Reading. (this book has a million great quotes! --cvh)
July 12, 2003
"In recent decades, I fear, the wrapping has sometimes become too attractive and much television news, in response to economic pressures, competition and perhaps a basic lack of commitment to the integrity and value of the enterprise, has become so trivial and devoid of content as to be little different from entertainment programming. "
--David Brinkley
"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
--James Baldwin
Hyacinth Priest shrugged. "Who knows where books come from? It's really a very great mystery, isn't it?""There is a type of person who has a quality about him that sets him apart from other and more ordinary human beings. Such a person has an instinct which is usually found only in small children, an instinct to establish immediate and vital contact between himself and all things in the world. Certainly the hunchback was of this type."
"Can I check it out?"
Miss Priest nodded. "I've been saving it for you."
The little hairs on the back of Jeremy's neck began to bristle. "How did you know I would be wanting it?"
Miss Priest raised an eyebrow. "What are librarians for?" she asked.--from: Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville
--from: The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers
May 26, 2003
"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees--just as things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
"We'll let blood
build a bridge,
over mountains
draped in stars
I'll meet you on
the ridge, between
these worlds apart
We've got this
moment now to
live, then it's all
just dust and dark
Let love give
what it gives
Let's let love give
what is gives."
--Bruce Springsteen, from "Worlds Apart" on The Rising.
"May your strength
give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love"
--Bruce Springsteen, from "Into the Fire" on The Rising.
zealot, from Webster's: a zealous person; a fanatical partisan. zealotry: fanatical devotion...
sound like anyone we know who needs to get voted out in '04?
April 14, 2003
Asagao no
hana de fuitaru
iori kana
A morning-glory vine
all blossoming, has thatched
this hut of mine.
--Haiku by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Harold G. Henderson
The Wild-Peach Blossom
By Pak Mok-Wol
The hill is
Kugang-san,
A purple stony hill;
One or two
Wild-peach blossoms
Begin to blow,
To the stream,
Jade-clear,
Flowing with melted spring snow,
A deer
Comes down
To wash her feet.
Translated by Kim Jong-gil.
March 17, 2003
(Matthew Wills writes:)
As GWB prepares to launch his re-election campaign tonight with a
Rovespeak ultimatum for SH, my mind is drawn to the great Thomas Paine,
who wrote this stirring call to dissent (and eerily familiar description of an earlier King George):
"Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I
should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by
swearing allegiance to one, whose character is that of a sottish,
stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man."
--Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. I, December 19, 1776
"Question: Mr President, how can you be sure that Saddam has chemical and biological weapons? Answer: We kept the receipts."
--Gwynne Dyer
Sign from NYC Peace Rally, Feb. 15, 2003:
February 26, 2003
"...But if the willingness of soldiers to kill and the tendency of war to
become as destructive as the existing technology and resources will permit
have both been relatively constant throughout human history, then we must
consider an unwelcome possibility: that war is the inevitable accompaniment
of any human civilization, and that a technologically advanced
culture like our own will sooner or later become involved in a war in which
all the available technology and resources are committed to the task of
destruction. There is a daunting amount of evidence to support this belief,
but there is also a fundamentally important fact that offers some kind of
hope. War is part of our history, but it is not in at all the same sense
part of our prehistory. It is one of the innovations that occurred between
nine and eleven thousand years ago when the first civilized societies were
coming into being. What has been invented can be changed; war is not in our
genes."
--Gwynne Dyer, from his book, War. Toronto: Stoddart, 1985.
"Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making;.... Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in light of, consultation with the governed." --John Berger
Signs seen at the NYC Rally, February 15, 2003:
"These colors don't run... the world. Peace Is Patriotic, Too!"
"Let Exxon send their own troops."
"How did our oil get under their sand?"
"Our government recommends duct tape for its foreign policy"
"SUVs Are WMD."
Not seen in... 20? 30? anyway, not seen in many many years: The Hudson River, filled with ice:
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
--Benjamin Franklin
January 3, 2003
"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out wild bells and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true."
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
"New Year's Eve. The first celebration of New Year's Eve in Times Square took place in 1906, sponsored by the New York Times to mark the completion of its new headquarters. The event was staged by the newspaper's publisher Adolph Ochs, who conceived of an elaborate "time ball" that would descend from atop a building precisely at midnight, intentionally recalling the globes used in most American cities during the 1870s and 1880s to keep time and synchronize watches. The brightly lit ball of Times Square became an annual feature of the celebration, except for two years during the Second World War. Each New Year's Eve the spectacle draws hundreds of thousands of persons to Times Square and millions of television viewers from across the nation."
--Michael O'Malley, found in The Encyclopedia of New York.
"Every city has its cold inanimate monuments of historic and cultural interest: old buildings, bronze statues, and great boulevards. Philadelphia has a living, breathing memorial to its greatness: the Mummers Parade. At the first of every year there is a lilt in the air, a song on the town. Princes and clowns, columbines and harlequins dance in the streets. Serpents and devils, angels and sinners, young and old blend into one massive, undulating brightly colored throng. Blue, red and yellow capes, white satin daisies, plush-red roses, laughter and life cover the city."
--Charles E. Welch, Jr., from Oh! Dem Golden Slippers: The Story of the Philadelphia Mummers.
My dad loved the Mummers and took us to the parade when we were little kids. If you ever have the chance, you should see the parade. There is really nothing like it. Here are some shots from New Year's Day, 2000.
November 18, 2002
"Some years ago, as we were paddling above Hackensack, we were hailed by a lady on the shore. She told us that seeing us swing by in our canoe reminded her of an earlier day. With a sparkle in her eye she told us about the old Kinderkamack Canoe Club and how they had steak and fish dinners at their clubhouse above Oradell once each month.... Perhaps it is wishful thinking on our part and of others who remember the Hackensack many, many years ago, but we would like to see that river again filled with canoes and other small craft."
--From Exploring the Little Rivers of New Jersey by James and Margaret Cawley, first published in 1942.
"I prefer to look at the river from the New Jersey side; it is hard to get close to it on the New York side, because of the wall of pier sheds. The best points of vantage are in the riverfront railroad yards in Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken. I used to disregard the 'DANGER' and 'RAILROAD PROPERTY' and 'NO TRESPASSING' signs and walk into these yards and wander around at will. I would go out to the end of one of the railroad piers and sit on the stringpiece and stare at the river for hours, and nobody ever bothered me."
--From Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. This essay originally published in 1960.
October 4, 2002
"I was still that child in The Snow Queen, asking 'what is sin?' but not knowing how to find out. Fortunately a Benedictine friend provided one answer: 'Sin, in the New Testament,' he told me, 'is the failure to do concrete acts of love.' That is something I can live with, a guide in my conversion. It's also a much better definition of sin than I learned as a child: sin as breaking rules.
"Comprehensible, sensible sin is one of the unexpected gifts I've found in the monastic tradition. The fourth-century monks began to answer a question for me that the human potential movement of the late twentieth century never seemed to address: if I'm O.K. and you're O.K., and our friends (nice people and, like us, markedly middle class, if a bit bohemian) are O.K., why is the world definitely not O.K.? Blaming others wouldn't do. Only when I began to see the world's ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior."
--Kathleen Norris in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
"He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."
--Thomas Paine
"There never was a good war or a bad peace."
--Benjamin Franklin
"War is the unfolding of miscalculations."
--Barbara Tuchman
"When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die."
--Jean-Paul Sartre
"Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
September 9, 2002
"That which dies does not drop out of the world. Here it remains; and here too, therefore, it changes and is resolved into its several particles; that is, into the elements which go to form the universe and yourself. They themselves likewise undergo change, and yet from them comes no complaint."
--Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180) in his Meditations
"There is no death. Only a change of worlds."
--Seattle, quoted in Joseph Epps Brown's The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian
"Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea."
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"I like to say that the essence of the Buddha's teaching can be found in two sayings: If possible, you should help others. If that is not possible, at least you should do no harm."
--His Holiness the Dalai Lama
"Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your real phone, for that matter. Be still. Be present."
--Anna Quindlen
June 21, 2002
Happy Summer Solstice!
Tiny Summer bungalows, Lavallette, New Jersey.
--Sir Alec Guinness, from his marvelous book, A Commonplace Book. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001.
"The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit."
--John D. MacDonald
"Nature gives you the face you have at twenty.
Life shapes the face you have at thirty.
But at fifty you get the face you deserve."
--Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel
"Difficult people are the greatest teachers."
--Pema Chodron
"Regret for the things we did
can be tempered by time;
it is regret for the things we did not do
that is inconsolable."
--Sydney J. Harris
"The illiterate of the 21st century
will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot
learn, unlearn, and relearn."
--Alvin Toffler
"The greater danger for most of us
is not that our aim is too high
and we miss it,
but that it is too low
and we reach it."
--Michelangelo
"The arrow that has left
the bow never returns."
--Persian proverb
"Not everything that is faced can be changed.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced."
--James Baldwin
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible
will make violent revolution inevitable."
--John F. Kennedy in a speech at the White House, 1962
May 6, 2002
"The blessings of the Abbé Huvelin's direction are the sort that are easily lost sight of, as is the case with other spiritual directors, for example, more recently, the Anglican priest Reginald Somerset Ward. Their writings (in Huvelin's case, all posthumous, compiled from the notes of those who heard him; in Somerset Ward's case, all published anonymously) do not convey -- we can well believe -- the extraordinary impression their words of personal counsel left with those who turned to them. In both cases they chose to 'write in souls' (as Huvelin said of Père de Condrem), souls that are difficult for others to read, and have now mostly passed to eternity. It reminds us that much that is most important in reality is quite particular, and escapes the generalizing glance of those who rely on books. It is tantalizing, but also perhaps humbling."
--Andrew Louth, from The Wilderness of God.
"May 26th: New Jersey awarded 90 percent of Ellis Island by US Supreme Court, 1998."
--from Jersey City Then and Now Calendar, 2002.
Cherry White
By Dorothy Parker
"I never see that prettiest thing --
A cherry bough gone white with Spring --
But what I think, 'How gay 'twould be
To hang me from a flowering tree.'"
--from The Viking Portable Dorothy Parker.
"bodice-ripper: a popular modern variety of romance that emphasizes the sexual excitement of seduction and ravishment, usually in colourful settings based on the conventions of the historical novel and peopled by pirates, highwaymen, wenches, etc. A classic example is Kathleen Winsor's best-selling romance, Forever Amber, 1944."
--from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.
April 7, 2002
"You told me good bye, how was I supposed to know, you meant please don't let me go."
--The Grateful Dead
"Then I go out at night to paint the stars."
--van Gogh
"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my
own heart."
--Virginia Woolf
"'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till
you come to the end; then stop.'"
--Lewis Carroll
"I resolve, if you like not my writing, go read something else."
--Robert Burton
"Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of
self, a celestial North Korea."
--Christopher Hitchens on heaven
"I think you would like the chestnut tree I met in my walk."
--Emily Dickinson
February 20, 2002
"Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of
unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be
entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions,
--such call I good books."
--Henry David Thoreau
"The biggest library if it is in disorder is not
as useful as a small but well-arranged one."
--Arthur Schopenhauer
"Books are never far from a scholar's hands,
just as songs are never far from a singer's lips."
--Chinese proverb
"All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour,
and the books of all time."
--John Ruskin
"Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down
from a shelf and frees them."
--Samuel Butler
"In books one finds golden mansions and women as beautiful as jewels."
--Chinese proverb
"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are."
--Mason Cooley
"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.... You bring to a novel, anything
you read, all your experience of the world.
You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."
--Angela Carter
"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and
continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The
pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any
library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed."
--Germaine Greer
"The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter
with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist-this is essential to the life of a
country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul-a university, a great
art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or
scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past
and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are
seeking and developing the highest things they know."
--Margaret Mead
December 9, 2001
Snow in Waterloo, Ontario, 2000.
"We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us."--Eric Hoffer
"The mind is never safisified with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity....The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope."
--Samuel Johnson
"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."
--Abraham Lincoln
"You have the God-given right to kick the government around -- don't hestitate to do so."
--Sen. Edmund Muskie, 1968 speech
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
--H.G. Wells, in The Outline of History, 1921.
November 18, 2001
Scenes from 7th Street, Jersey City. First in a series.
to think I've always known
I gave my life to you
just to save myself."
--Joe Henry, from the album Kindness of the World. The rest of the album is equally quotable.
"rough
home made
but
your spinal fluid
elusive
real
very very touching."
--Jenny Laden, Philadelphia, 1993.
(A revision, to an earlier quote)
If it be true what I do think,
there be five reasons we do drink --
Good friends,
Good wine,
or being dry,
Or lest we should be, by and by,
Or any other reason why.
"For the Americans the question was what form independence would take, and here, as in Europe, power would reside with the man on the spot with a gun in his hand. Except in Japan, the Philippines, and the N.E.I., (Netherlands East Indies) that man would not be an American. This fact opened the possibility that Communists would replace the old colonial rulers and that they might shut the Americans out of their Asia just as thoroughly as did the Japanese. The challenge for American policy-makers was how to simultaneously drive out the Japanese, prevent the resurgence of European colonialism, and foster the growth of democratic, capitalist local governments, all without actually making the effort necessary to put the man with a gun on the spot. In China, Indochina, and North Korea, it turned out to be an impossible challenge."
--Stephen Ambrose, talking about the U.S. and Asia at the end of WWII, in Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938.
October 28, 2001
"I say all of this as someone who opposed the use of the War Measures Act (for what it was worth from a student living in Europe) and continues to believe that it was wrong and unnecessary. Just as deomcracies are ill-suited to fighting wars, so they are to facing internal anti-democratic movements. Everything that makes democracy strong in normal times makes it weak when the basic rules are not respected by a part of its citizenry. But that is all the more reason to act with enormous care when a crisis arrives. Care of this sort is not weakness. It is necessary because it ensures that there are no incidents which will weaken the democracy's respect for itself in the aftermath. The indiscriminate arresting of five hundred people was precisely that sort of 'incident.'"
--John Ralston Saul, referring to the October Crisis of 1970 in Quebec, Canada. From Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century.
"How damned ridiculous it all is! The long generations toiling-skimping, lashing themselves screwing higher and higher the tension of their minds, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of intelligence to end in this -- My God what a time! All the cant and hypocrisy, all the damnable survivals, all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas. The ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men -- the heroics about war -- my country right or wrong -- oh infinities of them! Oh the tragic farce of the world."
--John Dos Passos (1896-1970), U.S. novelist, poet, playwright, painter. Diary entry, July 31, 1917. The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington (1973). Written while at the western front during the First World War.
"When the world is collapsing around you, sit quietly and drink your whiskey."
--cvh
"To be a useful person has always appeared to me something particularly horrible."
--Charles Baudelaire
"Nations -- like families -- only produce great men in spite of themselves. They make every effort not to produce them. And thus the great man has need, if he is to exist, of a power of attack greater than the power of resistance developed by several millions of individuals."
--Charles Baudelaire
(both Baudelaire quotes are from Intimate Journals.)
September 26, 2001: Some Thoughts on Peace
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
--Albert Einstein
"There was never a good war or a bad peace."
--Benjamin Franklin
"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it or who says it."
--Malcolm X
"The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force."
--Thomas Jefferson
"The only alternative to co-existence is co-destruction."
--Jawaharlal Nehru
"Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."
--Guy de Maupassant
"To refrain from imitation is the best revenge."
--Marcus Aurelius
"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: the nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."
--The Bible, Isaiah 2:4
"Laws are silent in time of war."
--Cicero
"War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it."
--Martin Luther
"He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."
--Thomas Paine
September 5, 2001: A Parker Interlude
Sanctuary
by Dorothy Parker
My land is bare of chattering folk;
The clouds are low along the ridges,
And sweet's the air with curly smoke
From all my burning bridges.
Pictures in the Smoke
by Dorothy Parker
Oh, gallant was the first love, and glittering and fine;
The second love was water, in a clear white cup;
The third love was his, and the fourth was mine;
And after that, I always get them all mixed up.
Bohemia
by Dorothy Parker
Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses' necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!
August 22, 2001
Quotations From the Poets' Corner in St. John the Divine Cathedral, New York City:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
"All you have to do it write one true sentence."
--Ernest Hemingway
"I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
--Robert Frost
"I stop somewhere waiting for you."
--Walt Whitman
"My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
--Langston Hughes
"All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful."
--Elizabeth Bishop
July 18, 2001
"Simple, clear purpose and principles
give rise to complex and intelligent behavior.
Complex rules and regulations
give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
--Dee Hock
"Whole of Jersey coast infested with man-eating monsters!"
--from Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence by Michael Capuzzo
"Mirror-pond of stars...
suddenly a Summer shower
dimples the water"
--Sora
July 4, 2001
"All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any."
--Paul first letter to the Corinthians 6:12 (KJV, of course! -lbj)
"Ours is a story mad with the impossible. It is by chaos out of dream,
it began as dream and it has continued as dream down to the last
headline you read in a newspaper, and of our dreams there are two things
above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or
would have dared to -- and that we have shown a considerable faculty for
making them come true."
--Bernard DeVoto on American history
"People do not live nowadays -- they get about ten percent out of life."
--Isadora Duncan
"Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must
never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life."
--Eleanor Roosevelt
"You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only
decide how you're going to live. Now."
--Joan Baez
"I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the
truth wherever I please."
--Mother Jones
"A leader who doesn't hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is
not fit to be a leader."
--Golda Meir
"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward
change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength
undefeatable."
--Helen Keller
"There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if
I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me
alive."
--Harriet Tubman
(All the above quotes from women are from the wonderful book, The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women, edited by Rosalie Maggio. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. -cvh)
June 20, 2001
"Our relationship to the earth and the other species that share it has also been conditioned by our religious models. The image of God as outside of nature has given us a rationale for our own destruction of the natural order, and justified our plunder of the earth's resources. We have attempted to "conquer" nature as we have tried to conquer sin. Only as the results of pollution and ecological destruction become severe enough to threaten even urban humanity's adaptability have we come to recognize the importance of ecological balance and the interdependence of all life. The model of the Goddess, who is immanent in nature, fosters respect for the sacredness of all living things. Witchcraft can be seen as a religion of ecology. Its goal is harmony with nature, so that life may not just survive, but thrive."
--Starhawk, The Spiral Dance
"It's curious how beautiful scenery seems to attract the second rate. For
me, I like it for a holiday, but I'd rather die than live permanently in
a beauty spot, at least till I'm much older."
--W. H. Auden
"Désirée tried to look for beauty in the Valley. But even the pink oleander flowers were poisonous. There was no water in the cement wash that the kids used as a skateboard park. The houses were little low stucco boxes that made your knuckles bleed when you rubbed against them as you walked past."
--Francesca Lia Block, Girl Goddess #9
"Why should a woman cast a spell? Why not? Everything else has been done. Casting a spell is a willful act, some say. It is interfering with the natural order of things. I say casting a spell is observing and participating as an equal partner in the natural order. A woman is part of the natural order. Her directed willpower is part of nature. I recognize the reluctance toward casting a spell. It is against every kind of social conditioning you have ever received. So I advocate doing this; go ahead and scare yourself. It's good for you.... 'But Z, what if it comes back to me tenfold?' Well, don't be a fool. Never use magic to attack the innocent. Then you have nothing to fear. Always target wisely, finding a positive approach toward what you seek."
--Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries
June 6, 2001
"The point is that you shouldn't think that you miraculously have to
become a beatnik or a bohemian or a hippie to elude the trammels of
convention. Successfully doing so doesn't require exaggerations of
conduct or oddities of dress that are alien to your temperament or your
upbringing."
--Philip Roth
"What the novelist does besides despise false novels is try to write true ones."
--John Gardner
"A whole summer ahead to cross off the calendar, day by day. Like the goddess Siva in the travel books, he saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour apples, peaches, and midnight plums. He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers."
--Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
May 23, 2001
"Truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not
by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for
research. I don't dream of someone who understands me immediately, who
seems to have known me my whole life, who says, "I know, me too." I want
someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what's
revealed; someone who asks, "and then what, and then what?
But you can't spend your whole life hoping that people will ask you
the right questions. You must learn to love and answer the questions they
already ask. Otherwise you're dreaming of visiting Venice by driving to
Boise, Idaho."
--Elizabeth McCracken, A Giant's House
"Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen,
eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."
--Walker Evans
"The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not stuck in the
everydayness of his own life. To be aware of the possibilities of the
search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in
despair."
--Walker Percy
"If you were agoraphobic... you'd be home by now."
--MH
"Good-bye to the novel, sanity, and good health. Hello angels!"
--Henry Miller, preface to Crazy Cock
"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God."
--Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer.
May 9, 2001
"The way humans ... perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to
process and understand complexity."
--Eric S. Raymond, from "Why Python?"
"Hurry up and see him fight, because if you don't
see him soon you'll never see him."
--Rafael Guerra Bejerano regarding Juan Belmonte,
matador.
"Memory is always an art, even when it works involuntarily. Emerson opposed the party of Memory to the party of Hope, but that was in a very different America. Now the party of Memory is the party of Hope, though the hope is diminished."
--Harold Bloom, in "An Elegy for the Canon."
"'To us it's very far from clear
The reasons for our being here.'
'We'd leave at once, but do not know
We've any place where we might go.'"
--Edward Gorey, in The Headless Bust.
"Vote early and vote often!"
--Old Hudson County slogan
April 25, 2001
"To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés
of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart."
--Martin Amis
"Five Reasons For Drinking:
Good wine- a friend -- or being dry -- Or least we should be by and by -- Or ---- any other reason why."
--Author unknown to me, I found it on an old poster at The Farmers' Museum, Cooperstown, NY.
"According to the book "Zen Nosusume" by Dr. Sato Yukimasa, Professor of Psychology of Kyoto University, Japan, Zen Meditation produces the following ten psychological effects:
1. To increase patience
2. To cure allergic conditions
3. To strengthen willpower
4. To improve reasoning power
5. To refine personality
6. To speedily calm the mind
7. To stabilize emotion
8. To raise working spirit and efficiency
9. To eliminate illness
10. To attain enlightenment"
--Found in The Advantages One May Derive From Zen Meditation by Rev. Sheng Yen, translated from Chinese by Kang Chen.
April 11, 2001
Times Square, NYC. Why would anyone visit here? Want to feel like you're there?
"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."
"Sure: life is a dream, and to take it as anything else is a form of madness. What you call sanity is just insanity to a less noticeable degree."
"Laughter is the most democratic of all facial expressions: we differ from one another by our immovable features, but in convulsion we are all the same."
"Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed."
"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it
will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that
terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we
get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens
only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How
many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood,
some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even
conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more,
perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon
rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is
a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
"Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself."
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
"Seventh heaven may be the whole truth of a sixth
sense come to pass."
"The patience of the bricklayer is assumed in the dream of the architect."
"The clown is a tiny man in whiteface who sits on the boardwalk painting people. He asks me, 'What do you dream about?' and I tell him about parrots and the poison flowers and the gold. So he paints delicately while I speak, tracing the brush like a tongue over my forehead and cheeks and eyelids. He paints me my dreams but I can't see them. I feel my dreams being licked onto my face with paint. Then he holds up the mirror. I see feathers and blossoms -- scarlet highlighted with gold."
"But dreams are like poems--
"The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice."
"Optimist: Someone who denies the power of the past."
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
"Work as though you live in the younger days of a better nation."
This piece "read" from the world at large:
A man on the subway was wearing one of those pirated knockoffs of
over-priced sweatshop labels slapped together in other sweatshops. The
label being pirated was The North Face. But in that weird
transformation of the language that often shows up on clothing made far
away, the logo, otherwise exactly designed, said The North Faith. Such a
faith must be a cold one, necessitating a warm coat, if not a hair
shirt.
"What would you do if you weren't afraid?"
"It's the nap you don't take that you regret the most."
"If you want to make art, start with your life."
"It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way."
"The Flaw in Paganism"
"I like this place, Fred. This is a nice place. How did you ever find it? I think you're perfectly marvelous, discovering a speakeasy in the year 1928. And they let you right in, without asking you a single question. I bet you could get into the subway without using anybody's name. Couldn't you, Fred?"
"April's air stirs in
"A 'commonplace book' is a collection of quotations gleaned from your
readings. These gleanings may be justly famous, (e.g., "Work is the
curse of the drinking classes." Oscar Wilde), or less famous, but still
of interest:
"Learning: To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover
that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life."
Czeslaw Milosz.
Matthew continues: "Lately, a number of friends have looked at my quizzically when I've
mentioned that I've been keeping a commonplace book for years; the
fashion for the form long ago fell out of favor, and it seems almost
lost to history. But here at The Constant Reader, we are, if nothing else, readers, which
suggests that we often come across things we read that we want to
remember, whether for their style or their content or, wonderful indeed,
their unity of both. So we should memorialize them. And share them."
Contributors: MEH, Blunt Jackson, Matthew Wills, Moira Savel, Rebecca Platzner, Carol Van Houten, Ellen Tulchinsky, Margaret Hinchcliffe, Nora Fussner, Jessica MacKenzie, Brynna Loppe, Mike Edwards, Stephen Berg, David Greenwood, John Hinchcliffe, Mary Stanley, Michael Capolan, Cathy Curatola, Golda Rademacher, Amy B.
--Henry David Thoreau, Walden
--Denis Johnson, Already Dead
--Milan Kundera, Immortality
--Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects
--Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
--Albert Einstein, I Believe
--Oscar Wilde, "An Ideal Husband"
--also Oscar Wilde, from the same play
March 28, 2001
--Seamus Heaney, from the poem "Squarings" in the collection Seeing Things, 1991.
--Gael Turnbull, from "An Irish Monk on Lindisfarne, About 650 A.D."
--Francesca Lia Block, from the novel, The Hanged Man.
in them you put what you
don't know you know"
--Adrienne Rich
--William Maxwell
--Susan Sontag (paraphrased)
March 21, 2001
--Eleanor Roosevelt
--True origin obscure, but I found it printed on the cloth
cover of Alasdair Gray's Poor Things -- not the
dust jacket, and no presence in the paperback. Gray
claims it is a quote from a Canadian poet, but extensive
research reveals no such poet, and no such poem.
--Matthew Wills
--Spencer Johnson
--New Yorker Cartoon, by BEK
--Chekhov
--E.L. Doctorow
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
--Dorothy Parker
--Dorothy Parker, from "Just a Little One."
willow-leaves... a butterfly
floats and balances
--Basho
March 21st, 2001 marked the beginning of Spring, and the beginning of The Constant Reader's Commonplace Book. Many thanks to our poet in residence, Matthew Wills, for coming up with this idea. We'd like to create a common place for staff and readers to collect, share, and save favorite quotes or observations from life. Here's Wills' explanation:
© The Constant Reader, 2000-2008. All rights reserved. Inquiries to: carol at constantreader.org
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