Roland Barthes: "The writer is someone who arranges quotes and removes the quotation marks."
*
When we read an essay, we pick up on some parts and miss others. Some aspects we find intriguing, others nonsensical. Some aspects make a deep impression, while others don’t even register.
With each bite, a maceration of greens, saliva, bacteria, and other organisms travels from the field into the great distillery of the cow’s rumen.
The task is not to ‘believe’ in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it.
Apps may represent the ultimate lock-in.
What is it to be home, what is it to be not-home?
If a book said a boy walked into a room, I was aware that there was no boy and there was no room.
We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.
Consciousness is thus left free to switch focus from one present moment to the next, and the sense of the self as experiencer is never felt to be interrupted, even though the perchings are discontinuous. These present moments are the stuff of subjectivity during ordinary mental states.
I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.
In the early days, they would throw out a handful of feathers, which would fly upwards if they were descending, and down if ascending.
I the morning. I the day. When the air was. The air is.
She is a tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand...
After the meal, the parents were allowed to go in and put their children to bed.
I did something just now that I haven’t done in years: I drank milk.
Some of my earliest memories are of saying words over and over to myself, hypnotizing myself.
’My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked...
Lots of readers get slowed up by lingering at the right, at line’s end.
The point is that she had something to say and is saying it as artfully as she possibly can. Whether or not there’s anything left of her afterwards is none of our business.
Aristotle lays out his theories in lecture form, easily accessible, whereas Ovid simply flies, and it is difficult to teach the art of flying.
We had to float.
I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘dying’ meant anymore.
Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn’t try.
A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive. Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor...
Spoken language uses a three-second rhythmic structure, with poets often writing three-second lines.
Sometimes doubt can enforce belief, because it takes the situation so seriously.
The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection.
’You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.
As a woman, I feel I should be the human shield for men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it softens things.
The religious women live in wretched buildings, compared to the monks...
When I got back I smashed my PSP with a rock.
They were blaming everything that went wrong on the lack of bloodshed.
It is as though every few seconds the brain asks what’s news.
She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression.
...urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous, and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.
When someone falls into the well outside town, people suck on his wet clothes when he is pulled out.
(No child ever recovers from not having cured his parents.)
You kind of lose respect for them because you’ve seen them degraded. And after some time, we stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.
People who read poetry but don’t write it are like those who have just heard about the burning bush.
....the local bad folk art got its signature bright yellow pigments from the urine of cows fed on quince.
How different is the linguistic version from the originally lived one?
Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends.
Left to its own devices, consciousness seems happy to just experience one thing after the next.
Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea.
Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.
It would be like trying to compare two novels by counting up their respective numbers of commas, colons and question marks.
Is it possible that it is the precise timing of the movements of a pen on the page or of reading a series of letters that allows us to write and read accurately?
The heavens are perfect. Perfection sounds round.
...if the history of the planet is represented by the distance from your nose to your outstretched fingertip then one stroke of a nail file would wipe away all human history.
The further inside one goes, the more one finds everybody.
It’s like watching a cloud and saying what it looks like, except you can make the cloud be what you say.
But the importance of knowing nothing is underrated.
Hollywood won’t take risks with unproven story lines...
I can’t help but think of ancient Rome.
There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes.
For every ounce of wax, a bee must consume about eight ounces of honey.
cotton nottoc
If the playwright concocts a new word, then the play is no longer holding up a mirror to reality. Instead, the play is creating its own reality through language.
But I think that grief is the place where statistics run out.
...numerology is where the intellect goes to die.
...meaningful human behavior...seems to be naturally produced/performed/packaged in units of one to ten seconds.
Thus the inner circle of active participants is brought together in a communal meal, transforming horror into pleasure.
It is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs.
His preaching was a sort of pattern of his mind, like the lines in his face.
It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him.
The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is a mosque that has also been a church and is not either of those, anymore.
It is a mathematical truth that there are only three geometrical figures with equal side that can fit together on a flat surface without leaving gaps: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons.
What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?
....what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth.....
Even though she chewed on it for nearly two hours, she could not reduce it to particles small enough to swallow.
You can’t eat a painting.
My whole life/now,/my whole life/on the tip/of a pen.
Like sugar in water, the words one employs must dissolve and altogether vanish.
And he kiss me all over like I am alive.
...is a kiss not the same as a prayer?
(.....Even now some little lyric poem is eating acidly into the fat heart of money.)
We are unaware of how it got there because we composed it unconsciously, intuitively.
Sacrificial rites serve to connect the moral and religious aspects of daily life, but only by means of a lengthy and hazardous detour.
This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives?
*
Authors:
Abasiyanik, Sait Faik
Ali, Kazim
Aslan, Reza
Barnes, Julian
Bollas, Christopher
Brown, Jericho
Burkert, Walter
Carson, Anne
Daum, Meghan
Davis, Katie
Davis, Lydia
Ducornet, Rikki
Finch, Annie
Gardner, Howard
Gawande, Atul
Girard, Rene
Grossman, David
Gunderman, Richard
Hamid, Mohsin
Hammond, Claudia
Harris, Sam
Hirschfield, Jane
Hoke, Mateo
Howe, Fanny
King, Lily
Klay, Phil
Knausgaard, Karl Ove
Lee, Li-Young
Lightman, Alan
Longenbach, James
Malek, Cate
Markson, David
McBride, Eimear
Mele, Nicco
Miller, Daphne
Moore, Lorrie
Orr, Gregory
Phillips, Adam
Robinson, Marilynne
Ruhl, Sarah
Sackville, Amy
Sharma, Akhil
Shavit, Ari
Sims, Laura
Solnit, Rebecca
Stern, Daniel N.
Tanizaki, Jun-ichiro
Valentine, Jean
Venkatesh, Sudhir
Wilner, Eleanor
Wiman, Christian
Windsor, Cooley
*
Titles:
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
A Useless Man
A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith
Bark
Being Mortal
Between Friends
can’t and won’t
Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown
Euphoria
Falling Out of Time
Family Life
Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson
Farmacology
Floating City
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
In Praise of Shadows
Levels of Life
Lily
Men Explain Things to Me
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
My Bright Abyss
My Promised Land, The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
My Struggle
Orkney
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occuption
red doc
Redeployment
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in a Digital World
The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath
The Faraway Nearby
The Paper Zoo
The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life
The Unspeakable
The Virtues of Poetry
Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
Understanding Religious Sacrifice
Visit Me in California
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
We Make a Life By What We Give
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
*
Abasiyanik, Sait Faik
“I did something just now that I haven’t done in years: I drank milk.”
A Useless Man, p. 119
Ali, Kazim
“The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is a mosque that has also been a church and is not either of those, anymore.”
A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, (ed. Kaminsky and Towler) p. 37
Aslan, Reza
“urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous, and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.”
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, p. 93
Barnes, Julian
“In the early days, they would throw out a handful of feathers, which would fly upwards if they were descending, and down if ascending.”
Levels of Life, p. 10
“But I think that grief is the place where statistics run out.”
ibid., p. 118
Bollas, Christopher
“It would be like trying to compare two novels by counting up their respective numbers of commas, colons and question marks.”
Catch Them Before They Fall, The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, p. 115
Brown, Jericho
“...is a kiss not the same as a prayer?”
A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 84
Burkert, Walter
“Thus the inner circle of active participants is brought together in a communal meal, transforming horror into pleasure.”
Understanding Religious Sacrifice (ed: Jeffrey Carter), p. 215
Carson, Anne
“....the local bad folk art got its signature bright yellow pigments from the urine of cows fed on quince.”
red doc, p. 49
“The heavens are perfect. Perfection sounds round.”
ibid., p. 27
Daum, Meghan
“The point is that she had something to say and is saying it as artfully as she possibly can. Whether or not there’s anything left of her afterwards is none of our business.”
The Unspeakable, p. 154
Davis, Katie
“Apps may represent the ultimate lock-in.”
The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in a Digital World, with Howard Gardner) p. 143
Davis, Lydia
“I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.”
can’t and won’t, p. 31
“cotton nottoc”
ibid., p. 101
“Even though she chewed on it for nearly two hours, she could not reduce it to particles small enough to swallow.”
ibid., p. 50
Ducornet, Rikki
“Like sugar in water, the words one employs must dissolve and altogether vanish.”
The Deep Zoo, p. 44
Finch, Annie
“Some of my earliest memories are of saying words over and over to myself, hypnotizing myself.”
A God in the House (ed. Kaminsky and Towler), p. 175
Gardner, Howard
“Apps may represent the ultimate lock-in.”
The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in a Digital World, with Katie Davis, p. 143
Gawande, Atul
“I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘dying’ meant anymore.”
Being Mortal, p. 157
Girard, Rene
“Sacrificial rites serve to connect the moral and religious aspects of daily life, but only by means of a lengthy and hazardous detour.”
from Violence and the Sacred in Understanding Religious Sacrifice (ed: Kramer), p. 258
Grossman, David
“After the meal, the parents were allowed to go in and put their children to bed.”
Between Friends, p. 93
“My whole life/now,/my whole life/on the tip/of a pen.”
ibid., p. 169
Gunderman, Richard
“When we read an essay, we pick up on some parts and miss others. Some aspects we find intriguing, others nonsensical. Some aspects make a deep impression, while others don’t even register.
We Make a Life By What We Give, p. 91
Hamid, Mohsin
“....what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth.....”
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, p. 205
Hammond, Claudia
“Spoken language uses a three-second rhythmic structure, with poets often writing three-second lines.”
Time Warped, Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, p. 74
“It is as though every few seconds the brain asks what’s news.”
ibid., p. 76
“Is it possible that it is the precise timing of the movements of a pen on the page or of reading a series of letters that allows us to write and read accurately?”
ibid., p. 85
“...if the history of the planet is represented by the distance from your nose to your outstretched fingertip then one stroke of a nail file would wipe away all human history.”
ibid., p. 125
Harris, Sam
“Left to its own devices, consciousness seems happy to just experience one thing after the next.”
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, p. 72
“There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes.”
“...numerology is where the intellect goes to die.”
ibid., p. 168
Hirschfield, Jane
“What is it to be home, what is it to be not-home?
A God in the House, p. 53
“You can’t eat a painting.”
ibid., p. 60
Hoke, Mateo
“As a woman, I feel I should be the human shield for men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it softens things.”
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation (ed. with Kate Malek) p. 231
“You kind of lose respect for them because you’ve seen them degraded. And after some time, we stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.”
ibid., p. 79
Howe, Fanny
“The religious women live in wretched buildings, compared to the monks...”
A God in the House, p. 110
King, Lily
“’My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked...”
Euphoria, p. 205
“'You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.”
ibid., p. 220
“They were blaming everything that went wrong on the lack of bloodshed.”
ibid., p. 47
Klay, Phil
“When I got back I smashed my PSP with a rock.”
Redeployment, p. 39
Knausgaard, Karl Ove
“It is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs.”
My Struggle, Book 1, p. 224
Lee, Li-Young
“People who read poetry but don’t write it are like those who have just heard about the burning bush.”
A God in the House, p. 131
Lightman, Alan
“For every ounce of wax, a bee must consume about eight ounces of honey.”
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, p.77
“It is a mathematical truth that there are only three geometrical figures with equal sides that can fit together on a flat surface without leaving gaps: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons.”
ibid., p. 76
Longenbach, James
“Not many people want to have tea with the Delphic Oracle, however mesmerizing her speech.”
The Virtues of Poetry, p. 59
Malek, Cate
“As a woman, I feel I should be the human shield for men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it softens things.”
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, p. 231
“You kind of lose respect for them because you’ve seen them degraded. And after some time, we stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.”
ibid., p. 79
Markson, David
“Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends.”
Fare Forward, Letters from David Markson (with Laura Sims), p. 132
McBride, Eimear
“And he kiss me all over like I am alive.”
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, p. 146
“I the morning. I the day. When the air was. The air is.”
ibid., p. 190
Mele, Nicco
“Hollywood won’t take risks with unproven story lines...”
The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath, p. 11
“I can’t help but think of ancient Rome.”
ibid., p. 208
Miller, Daphne
“With each bite, a maceration of greens, saliva, bacteria, and other organisms travels from the field into the great distillery of the cow’s rumen.
Farmacology, p. 36
Moore, Lorrie
“This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives?”
Bark, p. 70
Orr, Gregory
“The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection.”
A God in the House, p. 281
Phillips, Adam
“(No child ever recovers from not having cured his parents.)”
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, p. 45
Robinson, Marilynne
“Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn’t try.”
Lily, p. 259
“His preaching was a sort of pattern of his mind, like the lines in his face.”
ibid., p 253
Ruhl, Sarah
“Aristotle lays out his theories in lecture form, easily accessible, whereas Ovid simply flies, and it is difficult to teach the art of flying.”
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 33
“But the importance of knowing nothing is underrated.”
ibid., p. 39
“If the playwright concocts a new word, then the play is no longer holding up a mirror to reality. Instead, the play is creating its own reality through language.
ibid., p. 43
Sackville, Amy
“She is a tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand...”
Orkney, p. 22
Sharma, Akhil
“If a book said a boy walked into a room, I was aware that there was no boy and there was no room.”
Family Life, p. 38
Shavit, Ari
“When someone falls into the well outside town, people suck on his wet clothes when he is pulled out.”
My Promised Land, The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, p. 129
Sims, Laura
“Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends.”
Fare Forward, Letters from David Markson, p. 132
Solnit, Rebecca
“We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.”
Men Explain Things to Me, p. 88
“She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression.”
ibid., p. 99
“Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea.”
The Faraway Nearby, p. 249
“What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?”
ibid., p. 249
Stern, Daniel N.
“Consciousness is thus left free to switch focus from one present moment to the next, and the sense of the self as experiencer is never felt to be interrupted, even though the perchings are discontinuous. These present moments are the stuff of subjectivity during ordinary mental states.”
The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, p. 43
“How different is the linguistic version from the originally lived one?”
ibid., p. 8
“...meaningful human behavior...seems to be naturally produced/performed/packaged in units of one to ten seconds.”
ibid., p. 44
“We are unaware of how it got there because we composed it unconsciously, intuitively.”
ibid., p. 25
Tanizaki, Jun-ichiro
“Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.”
In Praise of Shadows, p. 10
Valentine, Jean
“Sometimes doubt can enforce belief, because it takes the situation so seriously.”
A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 71
Venkatesh, Sudhir
“We had to float.”
Floating City, p. 273
Wilner, Eleanor
“The further inside one goes, the more one finds everybody.”
A God in the House, p. 219
Windsor, Cooley
“Lots of readers get slowed up by lingering at the right, at line’s end.”
Visit Me in California, p. 69
“It’s like watching a cloud and saying what it looks like, except you can make the cloud be what you say.”
ibid., p. 28
Wiman, Christian
“A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive. Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor...”
My Bright Abyss, p. 89
“It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him.”
ibid., p. 106
“(.....Even now..... some little lyric poem is eating acidly into the fat heart of money.)”
ibid., p. 114
“The task is not to ‘believe’ in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it.”
ibid., p. 169
*
“Not many people want to have tea with the Delphic Oracle, however mesmerizing her speech.”
James Longenbach, The Virtues of Poetry, p. 59
“When we read an essay, we pick up on some parts and miss others. Some aspects we find intriguing, others nonsensical. Some aspects make a deep impression, while others don’t even register.
Richard Gunderman, We Make a Life By What We Give, p. 91
“With each bite, a maceration of greens, saliva, bacteria, and other organisms travels from the field into the great distillery of the cow’s rumen.
Daphne Miller, Farmacology, p. 36
“The task is not to ‘believe’ in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it.”
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, p. 41
“Apps may represent the ultimate lock-in.”
Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in a Digital World, p. 143
“What is it to be home, what is it to be not-home?
Jane Hirschfield, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 53
“If a book said a boy walked into a room, I was aware that there was no boy and there was no room.”
Akhil Sharma, Family Life, p. 38
“We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.”
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, p. 88
“Consciousness is thus left free to switch focus from one present moment to the next, and the sense of the self as experiencer is never felt to be interrupted, even though the perchings are discontinuous. These present moments are the stuff of subjectivity during ordinary mental states.”
Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, p. 43
“I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.”
Lydia Davis, can’t and won’t, p. 31
“In the early days, they would throw out a handful of feathers, which would fly upwards if they were descending, and down if ascending.”
Julian Barnes, Levels of Life, p. 10
“I the morning. I the day. When the air was. The air is.”
Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, p. 190
“She is a tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand...”
Amy Sackville, Orkney, p. 22
“After the meal, the parents were allowed to go in and put their children to bed.”
David Grossman, Between Friends, p. 93
“I did something just now that I haven’t done in years: I drank milk.”
Sait Faik Abasiyanik, A Useless Man, p. 119
“Some of my earliest memories are of saying words over and over to myself, hypnotizing myself.”
Annie Finch, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 175
“’My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked...”
Lily King, Euphoria, p. 205
“Lots of readers get slowed up by lingering at the right, at line’s end.”
Cooley Windsor, Visit Me in California, p. 69
“The point is that she had something to say and is saying it as artifully as she possibly can. Whether or not there’s anything left of her aftewards is none of our business.”
Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable, p. 154
“Aristotle lays out his theories in lecture form, easily accessible, whereas Ovid simply flies, and it is difficult to teach the art of flying.”
Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 33
“We had to float.”
Sudhir Venkatesh, Floating City, p. 273
“I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘dying’ meant anymore.”
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 157
“Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn’t try.”
Marilynne Robinson, Lily, p. 259
“A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive. Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor...”
Christian Wiman, from Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towner, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 89
“Spoken language uses a three-second rhythmic structure, with poets often writing three-second lines.”
Claudia Hammond, Time Warped, Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, p. 74
“Sometimes doubt can enforce belief, because it takes the situation so seriously.”
Jean Valentine, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 71
“The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection.”
Gregory Orr, from Kaminsky and Towler, p. 281
“’You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.”
Lily King, Euphoria, p. 220
“As a woman, I feel I should be the human shield for men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it softens things.”
ed: Kate Malek and Mateo Hoke, Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, p. 231
“The religious women live in wretched buildings, compared to the monks...”
Fanny Howe, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 110
“When I got back I smashed my PSP with a rock.”
Phil Klay, Redeployment, p. 39
“They were blaming everything that went wrong on the lack of bloodshed.”
Lily King, Euphoria, p. 47
“It is as though every few seconds the brain asks what’s news.”
Claudia Hammond, Time Warped, p. 76
“She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression.”
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, p. 99
“urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous, and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.”
Reza Aslan, Zealot:: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, p. 93
“When someone falls into the well outside town, people suck on his wet clothes when he is pulled out.”
Ari Shavit, My Promised Land, The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, p. 129
“(No child ever recovers from not having cured his parents.)”
Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, p. 45
“You kind of lose respect for them because you’ve seen them degraded. And after some time, we stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.”
ed: Kate Malek and Mateo Hoke, Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, p. 79
“People who read poetry but don’t write it are like those who have just heard about the burning bush.”
Li-Young Lee, , from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 131
“....the local bad folk art got its signature bright yellow pigments from the urine of cows fed on quince.”
Anne Carson, red doc, p. 49
“How different is the linguistic version from the originally lived one?”
Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, p. 8
“Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends.”
Laura Sims, Fare Forward, Letters from David Markson, p. 132
“Left to its own devices, consciousness seems happy to just experience one thing after the next.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, p. 72
“Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea.”
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 249
“Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.”
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, p. 10
“It would be like trying to compare two novels by counting up their respective numbers of commas, colons and question marks.”
Christopher Bollas, Catch Them Before They Fall, The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, p. 115
“Is it possible that it is the precise timing of the movements of a pen on the page or of reading a series of letters that allows us to write and read accurately?”
Claudia Hammond, Time Warped, p. 85
“The heavens are perfect. Perfection sounds round.”
Anne Carson, red doc, p. 27
“...if the history of the planet is represented by the distance from your nose to your outstretched fingertip then one stroke of a nail file would wipe away all human history.”
Claudia Hammond, Time Warped, p. 125
“The further inside one goes, the more one finds everybody.”
Eleanor Wilner, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 219
“It’s like watching a cloud and saying what it looks like, except you can make the cloud be what you say.”
Cooley Windsor, Visit Me in California, p. 28
“But the importance of knowing nothing is underrated.”
Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 39
“Hollywood won’t take risks with unproven story lines...”
Nicco Mele, The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath, p. 11
“I can’t help but think of ancient Rome.”
Nicco Mele, The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath, p. 208
“There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, p. 31
“For every ounce of wax, a bee must consume about eight ounces of honey.”
Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, p. 77
“cotton nottoc”
Lydia Davis, can’t and won’t, p. 101
“If the playwright concocts a new word, then the play is no longer holding up a mirror to reality. Instead, the play is creating its own reality through language.
Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 43
“But I think that grief is the place where statistics run out.”
Julian Barnes, Levels of Life, p. 118
“...numerology is where the intellect goes to die.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, p. 168
“...meaningful human behavior...seems to be naturally produced/performed/packaged in units of one to ten seconds.”
Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, p. 44
“Thus the inner circle of active participants is brought together in a communal meal, transforming horror into pleasure.”
Walter Burkert, Understanding Religious Sacrifice (ed: Jeffrey Carter), p. 215
“It is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1, p. 224
“His preaching was a sort of pattern of his mind, like the lines in his face.”
Marilynne Robinson, Lily, p 253
“It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him.”
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, p. 106
“The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is a mosque that has also been a church and is not either of those, anymore.”
Kazim Ali, from Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towner, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 37
“It is a mathematical truth that there are only three geometrical figures with equal sides that can fit together on a flat surface without leaving gaps: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons.”
Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, p. 76
“What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?”
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 249
“....what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth.....”
Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, p. 205
“Even though she chewed on it for nearly two hours, she could not reduce it to particles small enough to swallow.”
Lydia Davis, can't and won't p. 50
“You can’t eat a painting.”
Jane Hirshfield, from Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towner, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 60
“My whole life/now,/my whole life/on the tip/of a pen.”
David Grossman, Falling Out of Time, p. 169
“Like sugar in water, the words one employs must dissolve and altogether vanish.”
Rikki Ducornet, The Deep Zoo, p. 44
“And he kiss me all over like I am alive.”
Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, p. 146
“...is a kiss not the same as a prayer?”
Jericho Brown, from Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towner, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 84
“(.....Even now..... some little lyric poem is eating acidly into the fat heart of money.)”
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, p. 114
“We are unaware of how it got there because we composed it unconsciously, intuitively.”
Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, p. 25
“Sacrificial rites serve to connect the moral and religious aspects of daily life, but only by means of a lengthy and hazardous detour.”
Rene Girard, from Violence and the Sacred in Understanding Religious Sacrifice (ed: Kramer), p. 258
“This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives?”
Lorrie Moore, Bark, p. 70
*
nouns:
essay, milk, bed, air, days, feathers, book, apps, meal, memories, penis gourd, saliva, bacteria, field, cow’s rumen, home, house, mental states, trinket, parents, children, well, clothes, consciousness, essayists, paper, snowfall, surface, commas, colons, question marks, pen, page, letters, perfection, heavens, planet, nose, fingertip, nail file, history, everybody, readers, point, seconds, brain, circumstances, limitation, repression, women, buildings, monks, PSP, rock, bloodshed, god, reality, patience, imagination, uses, metaphor, necessities, language, structure, lines, doubt, situation, belief, feeling, resurrection, love, stomach, shield, things, cloud, nothing, Rome, Hollywood, person, wax, bee, honey, cotton, attention, moment, grief, statistics, word, mirror, language, numerology, intellect, units, seconds, circle, participants, meal, pleasure, horror, pattern, mind, lines, face, blasphemy, God, mosque, church, truth, figures, gaps, surface, squares, hexagons, equilateral triangles, openings, the unfinished, the incomplete, particles, painting, pen, sugar, kiss, prayer, poem, rites, daily life
verbs:
read, pick up, miss, find, make, register, travel, believe, perceive, represent, is, said, walk, think, recognize, switch, feel, flow, throw, fly, allow, drink, say, hypnotize, wear, squeak, have, fall, recover, suck, pull, lose, see, stop, listen, write, hear, leave, face, bring, tie, give, turn, seem, envelop, compare, count, allow, sound, go, wipe, linger, float, understand, try, perceive, take, live, treat, smash, compare, blame, ask, compel, watch, risk, help, determine, consume, concoct, hold, create, transform, swallow, fit, want, press, chew, reduce, swallow, employ, dissolve, vanish, kiss, eat, compose, serve, connect
*
Anne
Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In
the Time of the Girls, was published by BOA Editions in 2010. Her novel, Tribute, was published by Rescue Press
in 2014. Together with her husband, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Study Program
in Greece on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete for nearly thirty years. She
runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco and will be an
Artist-in-Residence at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts in the fall of
2015.
No comments:
Post a Comment