92. Misc. Quotes

In America, anyone can become president. That's one of the risks you take.
-Adlai Stevenson

Treat the media as you would any other watchdog. Stay calm, be friendly, let them sniff your hand and never turn your back.
-Amy Sprinkles, Public Information Officer, City of Grand Prairie (TX)

I wanted a perfect ending ... Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.
-Gilda Radner?

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
-Mark Twain

To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
-Carl Sagan

"Great sufferings render lesser ones quite incapable of being felt. And conversely, in the absence of great sufferings, even the smallest vexactions and annoyances torment us."
-Arthur Schopenhauer

91. Thank Youse VI

Thank you James Schevill
"She lies with Joyce in the exile's wind,
Molly's Yes singing through damp graves
The promise of warm flesh for bitter bones,
A Renoir for Ireland as winter raves."

Thank you James Wright
"She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom."

Thank you Jane Kenyon
"There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away."

Thank you Jane Kenyon
"Who is it who asks me to find
language for the sound
a sheep's hoof makes when it strikes
a stone? and who speaks
the words which are my food?"

Thank you Kathleen Raine
"Who could have thought that men and women could feel,
With consciousness so delicate, such tender secret joy?
With finger-tips of touch as fine as music,
They greet one another on viols of painted gold
Attuned to harmonies of world with world."

Thank you Lawrence Raab
It's what we want for ourselves,
wary of starting a fight, anxious
to avoid another scene, having suffered
through too many funerals and heard
how eloquently the dead are praised
who threw their lives away.

Thank you Louis Simpson
"When we went down the river on a raft
So smooth it was and easy it would seem
Land moved but never we. Clouds faded aft
In castles. Trees would hurry in the dream
Of water, where we gazed, with this log craft
America suspended on a gleam."

Thank you Marilyn Krysl
"Three things quickly - pineapple, sparrowgrass, whale -
and then on to asbestos. What I want to say tonight is
words, the naming of things into their thing,
yucca, brown sugar, solo, the roll of a snare drum,
say something, say anything, you'll see what I mean."

90. Anne Stevenson - Speaking to the Twenty-first Century

From: Speaking to the Twenty-first Century
by Anne Stevenson
Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

And yet, Szymborska’s view of humanity’s helpless subjection to the workings of evolution is in no way reductive. No note of bitterness, no melodramatic claim to absurdity taints her humanism. Nature, for this poet, is the process that has thrown the human species on top “for now”; what will happen in the next million years is anybodys guess. “The unthinkable is thinkable”, yes, but not controllable. It is enough to love the (for us) beautiful truth that the earth exists and that life continues with its wars of survival and processes of feeding, living, reproducing and dying. The trick is to see it happening with human eyes, feel it with human hearts, know it through human brains, yet never to expect nature to do us favours. If we can manage that, says Szymborska – in nearly every poem, once you read them carefully – we can live in the “Miracle Fair” of the “commonplace” whatever our fate or luck. And there is always an alternative; humans, alone among the species, can live in their imaginations. “The admirable number pi: / three point one four one. Every further digit is also just a start / (five nine two, for it never ends”. In ‘Pi’, opening her imagination to eternity, Szymborska suggests that even the universe is no match for the mind of man: “O how short, all but mouse-like, is the comet’s tail!”