Quotes by Professors - Page 73

Poets find their voices when they articulate the wishes of the dead, especially those slain as sacrificial talismans to a larger frame of existence.
Michael S. Harper
You bear a sword and shield, remind meof her labor, her stoning gaze. What beastwill your blade free next? What call will you loosefrom another woman's throat?
Donika Kelly
. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.
Major Jackson
You bend the nailBut keep hammering becauseHammering makes the world
Dean Young
NexusI wrote stubbornly into the evening.At the window, a giant praying mantisrubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,begging vacantly with pale eyes;and the commas leapt at me like wormsor miniature scythes blackened with age.the praying mantis screeched louder,his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.I walked outside;the grass hissed at my heels.Up ahead in the lapping darknesshe wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,a brontosaurus, a poet.
Rita Dove
Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.
Marvin Bell
We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over itsunsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing,but the brack of wanting what’s physicalto help us forget we are physical.
Cate Marvin
The talked about their messed-up, dysfunctional families, carefully respecting boundaries, never probing too deep in any one sitting. And they always ended up laughing. Even when the subject matter was intense or macabre, Henry’s sick and twisted and often politically incorrect sense of humor was infectious…Gloria laughed more in these first weeks at Oxford then she remembered laughing almost anywhere.
Andrea Kayne Kaufman
This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody getswhat they want. Never again are you the same. The longingis to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more byeach glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself.Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of somethingat sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listennow? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was onlysomething I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go.I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never.It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
Jorie Graham
I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.
Frances Mayes
...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first.
Craig Raine
Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.
Carol Guess
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...
Anne Carson
He remembers which sisterI like least and askshow she is doing.(lines 9-11 of the poem 'Divorce')
Carrie Etter
I’ve been here before, dreaming myselfbackwards, among grappling hooks of light.True to the seasons, I’ve lived every wordspoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?
Yusef Komunyakaa
‎I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.
Dean Young
Title: Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotelthe need gotta beso deep words can'tanswer simple questionsall night long notesstumble off the tongue& color the air indigoso deep fragments of gut& flesh cling to the songyou gotta get into itso deep salt crystalizes on eyelashesthe need gotta beso deep you can vomit up ghosts& not feel brokentill you are no morethan a half ounce of goldin painful brightnessyou gotta get into itblow that saxophoneso deep all the sex & dope in this worldcan't erase your needto howl against the skythe need gotta beso deep you can'tjust wiggle your hips& rise up out of itchaos in the cosmosmodern man in the pepperpotyou gotta get hookedinto every hungry grooveso deep the bomb lockedin rust opens like a fistinto it into it so deeprhythm is pre-memorythe need gotta be basicanimal need to see& know the terrorwe are made of honeycause if you wanna dancethis boogie be readyto let the devil use your headfor a drum
Yusef Komunyakaa
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
Anne Carson
That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.
Anne Carson
. . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
Eavan Boland
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Joyce Carol Oates
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.
Richard M. Rorty
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
Anne Carson
I regret to say I'munable to reply to your unexpressed desires.
Harryette Mullen
You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say?Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?
Gary D. Schmidt
The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking
Marvin Bell
Living together/ is one move closer/ to living apart
Kristi Maxwell
The day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop.I knew that a part of him would never be the same.They cracked more than his ribs.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.
Sam Lipsyte
Someone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the level of his gray eyes, which were silver in the shadows.He was here. He had come.Arin.
Marie Rutkoski
I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
Thomas Nagel
Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.
Gregory Maguire
You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You cast your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love—not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death.
Matthew Sharpe
Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.
Dan Chaon
It’s natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.
Morrie Schwartz
..the nuclear family from across the street, which, as a result of decay, truly did have 2.5 kids;
Robin Becker
Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant,but if there is anything dearer than being alive,it's dark to me.We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--we call it life. We know no other.The underworld's a blankand all the rest just fantasy.
Anne Carson
The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.
Anthony T. Kronman
My faceless neighbor spoke up:“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”I exploded:“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.
Elie Wiesel
What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change, you die. It's that simple. It's that scary.
Leonard Sweet
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...
Alexander McCall Smith
It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.
Toni Morrison
Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.
Gregory Maguire
I love you," he said, his voice catching. "When I thought you were going to die, I wanted to die.
Eloisa James
Please don't die.
Randy Pausch
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Joyce Carol Oates
Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.
Mark Mirabello
He told himself a story. Not at first. At first, there wasn’t time for thoughts that came in the shape of words. His head was blessedly empty of stories then. War was coming. It was upon him. Arin had been born in the year of the god of death, and he was finally glad of it. He surrendered himself to his god, who smiled and came close. Stories will get you killed, he murmured in Arin’s ear. Now, you just listen. Listen to me.
Marie Rutkoski
Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.
Junot Díaz
What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose.Drinking and smoking over and overWhat's so great about a life that's sober?There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.
Toni Morrison
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
Norman Cousins
The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.
Nalo Hopkinson
The people who had been recognized for making original contributions shared many more stories that started negatively but surged upward: they struggled early and triumphed later. Despite being confronted with more negative events, they reported greater satisfaction with their lives and a stronger sense of purpose.
Adam M. Grant
Trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget. Lord, what is this?
George Saunders
Maybe not today, Maybe not tomorrow. But somewhere down the line, there has to be a light.
Dana Johnson
When you are 70% sure, act /because the other 30% is reserved for hope /which is doubt turned upside-down.
Dean Young
But the truth, I realize now, is that I always hoped. Even if I knew my hope was a lie, I held on to it.
Joshua David Bellin
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.—Toni Morrison, “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” The Nation, 23 Mar. 2015
Toni Morrison