December 2009
55 posts
The Painter,
I am a painter, not much else. Houses are what I mostly work on, sometimes apartments. It’s not glamorous but it pays the bills and puts food on the table. I have a wife and two boys. Eight and twelve. They really grow up fast, shit. I paint and I eat with my family and I go to sleep. Things are steady. I love my wife and my kids, but I am angry. I am tired of all of this. I paint. I eat. I hug my...
“My friends who are about to read this book,
Rid yourself of all prejudice as...”
– Gargantua by François Rabelais
On the Occasion of an Argument beside the River...
Someone says we are trapped in language, and so the sun drops overhead through stilly pines where the river explains nothing and far away now several men and women on the Yangtze look up from their nets and point to the sky. Bright Chinese fish, like all my words struggle in the nets of a stranger. But because there is no surprise nor delight in the hour of owl-call and locusts vibrating in...
poetbabble:
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
- Francoise Sagan
“Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke (via nihilnoetia)
“Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude...”
– Henry David Thoreau This man came and settled down on my shoulder during the seven months I lived in my tent in London, through autumn, winter and spring. O’ how his words were good to me!
poetbabble:
printedandbound:
“You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.”
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
“The main object of modern literature ought to be the intricacies of the human...”
– Knut Hamsun
“The morality of the future will not dictate to people. It will absolutely refuse...”
– Peter Kropotkin That which has underscored the passing of the days, this past year..
“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for...”
– Thomas Wolfe
“I know dusk
And dawn, rising like a multitude of doves.
What men have only...”
– Arthur Rimbaud
“I used to have a theory that if I could just make one person’s life happy...”
– Charles Bukowski, Selected Letters 1965-1970
“I only loved one woman and, unlike all the others, she was the only one who...”
– Charles Bukowski, Letter Collections 1965 - 1970
“I must create my own System or be enslaved by another man’s
My business...”
– William Blake
“But his intense spiritual concentration gave him strength and self-confidence...”
– Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
“Some two thousand four hundred years before, Aristophanes had thrown mud at...”
– Colin Wilson, The Outsider
“Let us evade death in gentle phases,
remembering always that being alive...”
– Pablo Neruda
My bohemian life,
I went off, my fists in my torn pockets; My coat too was becoming ideal; I walked under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal; Oh! oh! what brilliant loves I dreamed of! My only pair of trousers had a big hole. Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes As I went along. My inn was at the Big Dipper. —- My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound. And I listened to them, seated on the side of the...
“Drink only when you’re thirsty,
eat only when you’re hungry
and...”
– anon
“I am one of those people who will dive into the swell, ready to face terrible...”
– Francisco Coloane
“You are so young child, you stand before beginnings. i would like to beg of you,...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you...”
– Ernest Hemingway.
I haven’t been able to write in a while. One true sentence at a time..
“how important it is in life to not necessarily be strong, but to feel strong, to...”
– Primo Levi, from the short story ‘bear meat’
I posted this a little while ago on my journal, but I like it really a lot. -
More and more, I’m becoming fascinated with language, and more the origins of it. Español es mi vino en el momenta. I’ve been trying to find out the french equivalent of ‘If pigs could fly’ (or, when hell freezes over), which means that something is impossible, a sarcastic reply. In french it is...
“A slow death comes for those who don’t revolt when they’re unhappy...”
– Pablo Neruda
“Poetry was born with man and will continue with man,
It will sing. We will...”
– Pablo Neruda
“Write about your own experience. By that experience someone else may be a bit...”
– Sylvia Plath - The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Encouraging words of the day
(via abriefhistoryoflife)
(via poetbabble)
“I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be...”
– Eugène Ionesco (via nihilnoetia)
“Humans are not made to sit at computer terminals or travel by aeroplane; destiny...”
– Werner Herzog, from Herzog on Herzog,
(via poetbabble)
“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
– Eugène Ionesco (via nihilnoetia)
In Defense of Poetry
poetbabble:
I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”
- Lloyd Dobler (as played by John Cusack)
“It creates an unlimited appetite for the absolute, yet its quantitative nature...”
– Raoul Vaneigem
“If it is important enough to you, you will find a way. If it is not, you will...”
– Unknown (via thechosenwords) (via dondante)
“The morality of the future will not dictate to people. It will absolutely refuse...”
– Peter Kropotkin
“Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people’s...”
– Ivan Illich (via nihilnoetia)
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from the...”
– D. H. Lawerence (via lastchatwithphontaine)
“The quality of your life is brought about by the quality of your thinking.”
– Anon (via oceanofmind)