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Quote Portrait Gallery
on the human condition
on love
on truth and justice
on the environment
on faith
quips and jokes
ON THE HUMAN CONDITION
“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.”
I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
“If you’ve never eaten while crying you don’t know what life tastes like.”
“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”
“I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from.”
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
“I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be “unfeminine” so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward an activist place where she herself could never go.”
“Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”
“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them…”
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
On LOVE
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
“If she’s amazing, she won’t be easy. If she’s easy, she won’t be amazing. If she’s worth it, you won’t give up. If you give up, you’re not worthy. … Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.”
“Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.”
“If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.”
“… sometimes I can feel it, the way we are
pouring slowly toward a curve and around it
through something dark and soft, and we are bound to
each other.”
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
ON TRUTH and JUSTICE
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
“In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
“I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
“They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.”
“People can’t hear anything except when it’s nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don’t mean it, or don’t know anything anyway, or it’s not true, or it’s against religion, or it’s not what they are used to reading in the newspapers…”
“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
“It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.”
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”
On the ENVIRONMENT
“Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is — whether its victim is human or animal — we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.”
“Once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk through beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.”
ON FAITH
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
“Eskimo: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” Priest: “No, not if you did not know.” Eskimo: “Then why did you tell me?”
“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music”
“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
“Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use him no differently anyway.”quips and jokes
“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.”
“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”
“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.”
“Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
“Never make a decision when you need to pee.”
“Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.”“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?”
“I give.”
“You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.”
“Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me what makes skies so blue,
And I’ll tell you why I love you.
Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Raleigh scattering make skies so blue,
Testicular hormones are why I love you.”