It can be a fascinating game, noticing how any person with vitality and vigor will have a little splash of red in a costume, in a room, or in a garden. - Edgar Cayce

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change. - Bret Harte

Work hard all your young days
and they’ll find you too, some morning
staring up under
your chiffonier at its warped
bass-wood bottom and your soul —
out!
— among the little sparrows
behind the shutter.

- William Carlos Williams,
"January Morning: Suite 13"

Time does go on—
I tell it gay to those who suffer now—
They shall survive—
There is a sun—
They don’t believe it now—

- Emily Dickinson

Because life's too short to blush,
I keep my blood tucked in.
I won't be mortified
by what I drive or the flaccid
vivacity of my last dinner party.
I take my cue from statues posing only
in their shoulder pads of snow: all January
you can see them working on their granite tans.

That I woke at an ungainly hour,
stripped of the merchandise that clothed me,
distilled to pure suchness,
means not enough to anyone for me
to confess. I do not suffer
from the excess of taste
that spells embarrassment:
mothers who find their kids unseemly
in their condom earrings,
girls cringing to think
they could be frumpish as their mothers.
Though the late nonerotic Elvis
in his studded gut of jumpsuit
made everybody squeamish, I admit.
Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.

Was the audience afraid of being tainted
--this might rub off on me--
or were they--surrendering--
what a femme word--feeling
solicitous--glimpsing their fragility
in his reversible purples
and unwholesome goldish chains?

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It's intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.

- Alice Fulton, "About Face"

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. - Susan Sontag

We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,

for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles

and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"

though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.

- Rae Armantrout, "Thing"

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them. - John Steinbeck

If I have learnt anything, it is that life forms no logical patterns.

It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?
- Margot Fonteyn

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face. - Malcolm Gladwell

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars. - Fred Allen

Either be hot or cold. If you are lukewarm, the Lord will spew you forth from His mouth. - Jerry Lee Lewis

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"