The original is unfaithful to the translation. - Jorge Luis Borges

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave. - E.M. Forster, as a young child

In our town—our town of shadows, our town of mystery—it seems our buildings have, without reason, begun to disappear completely. Still full of their loyal inhabitants, the buildings and the people all disintegrate soundlessly. The air has been hard to breathe, full of regret and the glassy voices of the unsurprised dead. Our commuters have begun carrying photographs of their loved ones with them to work. On the bus, we look at each other, pictures of our sad wives and doubtful children huddled close to our chests, quietly imagining the silent elaborations of our own deaths. We are disappointed coming home that evening because the many photos betray our cowardice: We live in a town that is disappearing, and worse, like the buildings, our hope is gone and we are no longer surprised by anything.

- Joe Meno, The Boy Detective Fails

The drugstore is fairly empty, at the soda fountain a group of girls sip chocolate malts and a Filipino workman eats a hamburger. Everyone else is watching the Countess Osterberg-Steblechi, who pays no attention but very slowly revolves the paperbacked crime novels on their stands. It is the fate of the Countess to be stared at, and one cannot be surprised. She is like a balloon blown up into roughly human shape and ready to burst. All swollen and sagging contours except for her face; her beaky nose and sharp hooded eyes remind you of a falcon. She has hair that looks like a wig but is really her own dyed red, and wears a piece of garish linen printed all over with flowers and cornucopias like old-fashioned wallpaper.

- Gavin Lambert, The Slide Area

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside. - Mark Twain

No Rack can torture me—

My Soul—at Liberty—
Behind this mortal Bone
There knits a bolder One—

You cannot prick with saw—
Nor pierce with Scimitar—
Two Bodies—therefore be—
Bind One—The Other fly—

The Eagle of his Nest
No easier divest—
And gain the Sky
Than mayest Thou—

Except Thyself may be
Thine Enemy—
Captivity is Consciousness—
So’s Liberty.

- Emily Dickinson

They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore....I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris. - Frida Kahlo on Andre Breton and the Surrealists

In the flashes and black shadows
of July
the days, locked in each other’s arms,
seem still
so that squirrels and colored birds
go about at ease over
the branches and through the air.

Where will a shoulder split or
a forehead open and victory be?

Nowhere.
Both sides grow older.

And you may be sure
not one leaf will lift itself
from the ground
and become fast to a twig again.

- William Carlos Williams, "The Hunter"

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives
they must lead. - Charles Bukowski

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law

is not punished. - Jeremy Bentham

With new zest, as if he were returning to an earlier and more exuberant period of his life, the middle-aged but still vigorous Master devoted himself to a series of miniatures that in every way surpassed his finest efforts of the past. From the pit of a cherry he carved a ring of thirty-six elephants, each holding in its trunk the tail of the elephant before it. Every elephant possessed a pair of nearly invisible tusks carved out of ivory. One day, the Master presented to the King a saucer on which stood an inverted ebony thimble. When the King picked up the thimble, he discovered beneath it a meticulous reproduction of the northwest wing of his toy palace, with twenty-six rooms fully furnished, including a writing table with ostrich-claw legs and a gold birdcage containing a nightingale.

Scarcely had the maker of miniatures completed the thimble palace when he felt a new burst of restlessness. Once embarked on his downward voyage, would he ever be able to stop? Besides, wasn’t it plain that the tiny palace, though but partially visible to the unaided eye, revealed itself too readily, without that resistance which was an essential part of aesthetic delight? And he proposed to himself a plunge beneath the surface of the visible, the creation of a detailed world wholly inaccessible to the naked eye.

- Steven Millhauser, "In the Reign of Harad IV"

I run into some people and
they ask me how you are
I'll tell them that you're doing well
and hope that they step in front of a car

- Langhorne Slim, "By the Time the Sun Goes Down"

The shirt touches his neck
and smooths over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.

- Jane Kenyon, "The Shirt" (via 3qd)

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper. - Jerry Seinfeld

We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we're capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we're ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn't bounce back,
The flat tire at journey's outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it—here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, "See, that's why
I don't like to eat outside."

- Paul Violi, "Appeal to the Grammarians"

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have sardines in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's sardines?"
All that's left is just letters.
"It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it oranges. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called sardines.

- Frank O'Hara, "Why I Am Not a Painter"

Lucy: Beethoven's birthday is December 16^th, Shermy! Have you decided what you're going to get me?

Shermy: Yes! I'm not going to get you anything!

Lucy: What kind of a holiday is it where you don't give girls presents?

– Charles Schultz, Peanuts

It's just completely impossible. You can have a face on your neck but you can't have a neck on your face, because then it's a neck. - Neck Face

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. - Mark Twain

Mack’s eyes fixed on me, then left me, scanned the crowd uncomfortably, then found me again as I approached him. His large, tanned face took on an expression of stony unsurprise, as if he’d known I was somewhere in the terminal and a form of communication had already begun between us. Though, if anything, really, his face looked resigned—resigned to me, resigned to the situations the world foists on you unwilling, resigned to himself. It was what we had in common, though neither of us had a language which could express that. So, as I came into his presence, what I felt was an unexpected sympathy—for him, for having to see me now. And if I could’ve turned and walked straight away from him I would have.

- Richard Ford, "The Reunion"

Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better. - Unknown

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. - H.G. Wells

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm. - Colette

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose. - Bette Davis