Power Quote: W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin
“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
-From “Berryman”
POWER QUOTE: AR AMMONS
“where i came from it
wouldn’t be smart to talk about art:
talk about sawing logs or getting
the swamp hogs up or worming tobacco
or gutting ditches would be a lot
safer: when in Rome: don’t try to
get the Romans to do what you do.”
(from the poem GLARE)
Power Quote: William Hazlitt (for Blake)
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.
Steve Albini Bucks You (Me?) Up About Your (My?) Life Choices
I traded books with the hot girl who works at the coffee shop across from my house. She’s got my Collected Jack Spicer and I’ve got her copy of the pictured-above: We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the Collected Interviews. (Though not the “complete” interviews. This book came out from Akashic in 2001.) So far my favorite thing in it is this interview that Steve Albini gave to Luis Illades of Pansy Division. The whole thing’s worth reading, but here’s a power quote for you (me? us?).
At this point, being a musician as well as an engineer and a producer, it seems as though you’re pretty satisfied with where you’re at and what you’ve done. Are there goals you still have that you want to meet?
[…] The way I operate now–and this is what’s bred contentment in me–is that I know how I’m going to behave. I know how I’m going to interact with other people and weigh the importance of the things in my life and the things I have to do for other people. I don’t know the results; they’re going to be a surprise. That’s true of almost everything in my life. I know how I’m going to live. I don’t know what my life will entail.
Mr. Kierkegaard’s Sunday Morning Service
Every human existence not conscious of itself as spirit, or not personally conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some abstract universal (state, nation, etc.), or in the dark about its self, simply takes its capacities to be natural powers, unconscious in a deeper sense of where it has them from, takes its self to be an unaccountable something; if there were any question of accounting for its inner being, every such existence, however astounding its accomplishment, however much it can account for even the whole of existence, however intense its aesthetic enjoyment: every such life is none the less despair.
– The Sickness Unto Death
Power Quote: James Joyce
If you would like to read again, or (I’m hoping) for the first time, an excerpt from the penultimate chapter “Ithaca” in Ulysses, wherein Stephen (of A Portrait of an artist as a young man) escorts a drunken Leopold Bloom home, click after the break.
Power Quote: Henry James
Stole this from my friend Usedbuyer 2.0. It’s quite good:
“The American was thin, dry, fine, with something in his face which seemed to say that there was more in him of the spirit than of the letter.”
From The Modern Warning
Talking back at quotes on writing
I came across these nice quotes about writing, and since I can’t talk back at my mother, I figure I would talk back at famous writers. I’d rather get a roll in the grave than a slap in the face. All in fun, and much respect to these writers’ ideas on writing, but it kinda annoys me when people tell others “the final word” on writing, or art, or life in general. What makes Faulkner & Orwell (just a random pair) each so awesome is their completely different approach/goal, thus their completely different audience. I think the same applies to politics and religion, and other stuff people like to fight about. Certain arguments or dialogs are futile — writing just is, and I’m grateful to be able to choose what I read and to enjoy it. I’m happy that we all enjoy words, and that’s about it. Check out the linked quotes, some are really special. After the break is just for fun.
Power quote: Seduced By His Touch, by Tracy Anne Warren
Let's just be friends, okay?
She lifted an eyebrow. “You want a truce, do you?”
“Yes, most particularly in the bedroom.” His fingers inched toward the small of her back, pausing to draw clever little circles over a spot where she was extremely sensitive.
Damn him for knowing about that spot, she thought as she arched involuntarily beneath his touch. Her heart hammered, telltale moisture gathering between her thighs.
“It’s not as if we’d be breaking any rules,” he pointed out with husky persuasion. “Quite the contrary, in fact, since our union is sanctioned by the laws of both God and man. So why deny ourselves? Why not enjoy what pleasure we can find?”…
In a devastating move, he stroked his hand over her naked bottom., then slid a pair of fingers deep into her aching core. Her spine arched, instant bliss flooding her system.…
And he was right, she did love it. And she would be devastated if he stopped. But he had to know that already, since her body was quite literally weeping from the ecstacy he’d given her, and was giving her still.
Philo$ophy and the Mirror of Nurture
Many years ago, my fiancee attempted to lend me a bit of responsibility by introducing me to my would-be mother-in-law as a future PhD in literature. “From Columbia,” I added, polishing the apple of my prospects. She wasn’t buying it. “A doctor of philosophy,” she said. “What’re you going to do, open an philosophy store?”
— Mark Slouka