Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows . . .
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

- Vera Pavlova

Come to the edge
He said. They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge
He said. They came.
He pushed them, and
they flew...

- Guillaume Apollinaire

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

- William Meredith, "The Illiterate"

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood. - George Santayana

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
- Oscar Wilde

My forefathers gave me
My spirit’s shaken flame,
The shape of hands, the beat of heart,
The letters of my name.

But it was my lovers,
And not my sleeping sires,
Who gave the flame its changeful
And iridescent fires;

As the driftwood burning
Learned its jewelled blaze
From the sea’s blue splendor
Of colored nights and days.

- Sarah Teasdale, "Driftwood"

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. - Albert Einstein

When the young man on State Street
approached as if to ask directions,
saying, "Can you help me out a little here?"
and I, though I already knew, said,
"Help you out how, exactly?"
"A dollar or two if you can,"
he said, and I took a deep breath,
holding in what I might've held out,
hearing When someone asks, you
give what you can, from my bank
of training in the ways of compassion,
and though I didn't want to,
opened my wallet, and
with the munificence of a toad,
pulled out a five and bought him off.

- Dan Gerber, "Bodhisattva"

A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. - Joan Didion

The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one other person. - Vi Putnam

It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it. - Henry Allen

You live and learn. At any rate, you live. - Douglas Adams

Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things:
the smell of spilled oil a faint
sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows

- Margaret Atwood, "The City Planners"

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. - Casey Kasem

Everything has been taken that anyone
thought worth taking. The stairs are tilted,
scattered with sycamore leaves curled
like ammonites in inland rock.
Wood shows through the paint on the frame
and the door is open--an empty room,
sunlight on the floor. All that is left
on the porch is the hollow cylinder
of an Albert's Quick Oats cardboard box
and a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrial
head is bowed, its scrolled neck
glistens. I was born, that day, near there,
in wartime, of ignorant people.

- Sharon Olds, "Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942"

I laugh sometimes when I think about say Céline at a typewriter or Dostoevsky... or Hamsun... ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes, ordinary men with hair on their heads sitting there typing words while having difficulties with life while being puzzled almost to madness. Dostoevsky gets up he leaves the machine to piss, comes back drinks a glass of milk and thinks about the casino and the roulette wheel. Céline stops, gets up, walks to the window, looks out, thinks, my last patient died today, I won't have to make any more visits there. when I saw him last he paid his doctor bill; it's those who don't pay their bills, they live on and on. Céline walks back, sits down at the machine is still for a good two minutes then begins to type. Hamsun stands over his machine thinking, I wonder if they are going to believe all these things I write? he sits down, begins to type. he doesn't know what a writer's block is: he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch damn near as magnificent as the sun. he types away. and I laugh not out loud but all up and down these walls, these dirty yellow and blue walls my white cat asleep on the table hiding his eyes from the light. he's not alone tonight and neither am I. - Charles Bukowski, "one thirty-six a.m."

Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system. - P.J. O'Rourke

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. - Chinese proverb

Dear Magnitude, I leave the how much
to you. Bereft of equation,

I'd rather logarithms lodged elsewhere—
there is no sensitivity in numbers,

only in effects. In the calm, let us speak
in effects: a ball drops

dragon's mouth-to-frog's mouth,
a pendulum swings on its knife-edge

pivot. I'd say the measurable
captivates more than the measurement

in any accident, but I am merely a mass
suspended. Set my pen

to drum, set my drum recording—
I am the instrument of your intensity

and you my more. If there
be foundation, I have found it

to be oscillating. If there be water,
it is something falling.

Be peak to my trough, be hand
fastened to my throat. Shake me

something fierce and I will be the figure
of what you did.

- Cecily Parks, "Self-Portrait as a Seismograph"