because I'm trying to title the Bra'tac Is Awesome (but not a singer) choc_fic story

[minxy]

Quote dump 3


The poet has come back to being a poet
after decades of being virtuous instead.

Can't you be both?
No. Not in public.

You could, once,
back when God was still thundering vengeance

and liked the scent of blood,
and hadn't got around to slippery forgiveness.

Then you could scatter incense and praise,
and wear your snake necklace,

and hymn the crushed skulls of your enemies
to a pious chorus.

No deferential smiling, no baking of cookies,
no I'm a nice person really.

Welcome back, my dear.
Time to resume our vigil,

time to unlock the cellar door,
time to remind ourselves

that the god of poets has two hands:
the dextrous, the sinister.

--Margaret Atwood, The Poet Has Come Back (From The Door, 2007.)


"It isn't those who are taken by force, put in chains and sold as slaves who are the real slaves; it is those who will accept it, morally and physically."
God's Bits of Wood - Sembene Ousmane


Without any assistance or guidance from you, I have loved you assiduously for 8 months, 2 weeks, and a day. I have been stood up four times. I've left seven packages on your doorstep, forty poems, 2 plants and 3 handmade notecards. I left town so I could send to you. You have been no help to me on my job. You call at 3:00 in the morning on weekdays so I could drive across the bay before I go to work.

charmin.
charmin.

but you are of no assistance. I want you to know this was an experiment. To see how selfish I could be. If I would really carry on to share a possible lover. If I was capable of debasin myself for the love of another. If I could stand not being wanted when I wanted to be wanted.
And I cannot.
So
with no further assistance and no guidance from you
I am ending this affair."
-- Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf

When you are lonely, writing can help keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things -- as opposed to making things up -- that did not quite happen.
-- Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

Science is a lot like sex. Sometimes something useful comes of it, but that's not the reason we're doing it.
-Richard Feynman

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay, Love is not all

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Fail again. Fail better.
-Samuel Beckett

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
-Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

And how shall the soul of a man
Be larger than the life he has lived?
-Samuel Gardner

Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have time.
-- Tallulah Bankhead

'Stay' is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.
-- Louisa May Alcott

Perseverance is failing nineteen times and succeeding the twentieth.
-- Julie Andrews


Vitrous humour- inner eye liquid.


Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --

--Emily Dickinson


“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” -Alvin Toffler

a pornography of horror (Robin McKinley)

Have me in the blue and the sun.
Have me on the open sea and the mountains.

When I go into the grass of the sea floor, I will go alone.
This is where I came from—the chlorine and the salt are
blood and bones.
It is here the nostrils rush the air to the lungs. It is
here oxygen clamors to be let in.
And here in the root grass of the sea floor I will go alone.

Love goes far. Here love ends.
Have me in the blue and the sun.

-Carl Sandburg, Have Me

The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. It could not be better expressed.
--Mark Twain, Letter to the Earth

If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
--Kahlil Gibran

They said I was too young and then when I was old enough, they said they were too old.
-- Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

http://ng-photo.livejournal.com/356212.html

You play the loving woman; I’ll play the faithful man.
--Bruce Springsteen, Secret Garden

Every time we say good-bye
I see it as an extension of
the Hindenburg:
that great 1937 airship exploding
in medieval flames like a burning castle
above New Jersey.
--Richard Brautigan,Your Departure Versus the Hindenburg

I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.
--Richard Brautigan,Boo, Forever

And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
~ T.S. Eliot

In my boredom, I take the sky to task,
Joy makes me weep, sorrow makes me laugh
In another existence, I would not want to be reborn a man
Rather be a pine tree rustling in the sky
On the hills, standing above the cliff
Those who can endure the cold can rise to the pine-tree.
-Pine-tree, Nguyen Cong Tru


The black bird always boasts of its intelligence
But only lives as a parasite in a nice cage.
To learn to speak the human language
It resigns itself to having the end of its tongue cut.
-The Black Bird, by Cao Ba Quat


http://www.carmackphoto.com/home.htm


Bad stars are cold topography, I live there.
The earth turns the color of trailing lantana.

Remember the red diary, mother, the sooted addiction to sex?
Bad, blathering thing, your daughter deep in her fret of blossom.

I hid between flowers on the yellow wallpaper, waiting and staring,
Scissors on hair unlocked as you refused to give in.

We had potato latkes, noodle pudding so rich its sugar
Tinged the tablecloth I made in Art with ruby bloodlines.

Your voice hit the porch like vees of gulls.
I sat there and rocked, inhaling a stolen Winston.

Nicotine bloated the floorboards, stained the mint green paint
I saw my dead father’s hands holding a smoke.

Look, daughter, he cried. I left what unsettles me
to come here, lowdown where your uncured stems root,

I saw the future, an Indian-named lake I could drown in.
This omen is so bad, I want it stark

The way you turned dead, I was not let down easy.
Your body bathed and visited, I could not bear to know!

Remember how I danced on the porch to Baby, Baby, can’t you Hear my Heart Beat?
You and I, Dad, away and apt, letting go, taking the sky like a tonic,

Rain jabbing holes in the forsythia, and boys in Levis
Passed by on the street, their eyes on me converted

To a species of piranha, how after the shear imitation of weather,
You loved off my doll’ s hair, forced her hold to let go

You recited a poem – Though nothing can bring back the hour
I know the rest says don’t grieve, but let me go slowly

Perhaps we could dig dirt in the garden, pick the poison
Lantana with both our hands, fetching it to mother.

--Nanette Rayman Rivera, from Lily Lit Review


In Persian, there are 89 words for love.
I would be happy just to remember one.
Keeps me up at night, memorizing
your name.
- Nicole Walker, Love Poem


You know about desks and noses,
proteins, mortgages, orchestras,
nationalities, contraceptives;
you have our ruins and records,
but they won’t tell you
what we were like.

We were distinguished
by our interest in scenery;
we could look at things for hours
without using or breaking them—
and there was a touch of desperation, not to be found
in any other animal,
in the looks of love we directed
at our children.

We were treacherous of course.
Like anything here—
wind, dogs, the sun—
we could turn against you unexpectedly,
we could let you down.
But what was remarkable about us
and which you will not believe
is that we alone,
with the exception of a few pets
who probably learned it from us,
when betrayed
were frequently surprised.

We were one of a millions species
who continually cried out
or silently wept with pain.
I am proud that we alone resented
taking part in the chorus.

Yes, some of us
liked to cause pain.
Yes, most of us
sometimes
liked to cause pain,
but I am proud that most of us
were ashamed
afterward.

Our love of poetry would have amused you;
we were so proud of language
we thought we invented it
(and thus failed to notice
the speech of animals,
the birds’ repeated warnings,
the whispered intelligence
of mutant cells).

We did invent boredom,
a fruitful state.
It hid the size of our desires.
We were spared many murders,
many religions
because we could say, “I am bored.”
A kind of clarity
came when we said it
and we could go to Paris or the movies,
give useful parties, master languages,
rather than sink our teeth in our lover’s throat
and shake till things felt right again.

Out of the same pulsing world
you know,
out of gases, whorls,
fronds, feelers, jellies,
we devised hard edges,
strings of infinite tension stretched
to guide us.
The mind’s pure snowflake
was our map.
Lines, angles, outlines
not to be found in rocks or seas
or living matter
or in the holes of space,
how strange these shapes must look to you,
at odds with everything,
uncanny, broken from the flow,
I think they must be for you
what we called art.

What was most wonderful about us
was our kindness,
but of this it is impossible to speak.
Only someone who knows our cruelty,
who knows the fears we always lived with,
fear of inside and outside, smooth and rough,
soft and hard, wet and dry, touch and no touch,
only someone who understands the great palace we built
on the axis of time
out of our fear and cruelty and called history,
only those who have lived in the anger
of a great modern city,
who saw the traffic in the morning
and the police at night
can know how heartbreaking
our kindness was.

Let me put it this way.
One of us said, “I think
our life is not as good
as the mind warrants,”
another, “It is hard
to be alone and alive at the same time.”
To understand these statements
you would have to be human.

Our destruction as a species
was accidental.
Characteristically
we blamed it on ourselves,
which neither the eagle
nor the dinosaur would do.

Look closely around you,
study your instruments,
scan the night sky.
We were alien.
Nothing in the universe
resembles us.
-Michael Goldman, Report on Human Beings


You see before you a self-made man, thereby demonstrating the horrors of unskilled labor.
-Harlan Ellison

The world really couldn't have chosen a worse time to end.
I was waiting for a package from Amazon and savoring the last
chapter of a really great novel. I wanted to make love a few more times
or at least have some more sex. And to think, just next week: season finales.
No one will get to see those big episodes. A few more months and some of them
could have won an award or two, but no. It was just bad timing really.
So anti-climatic. I mean, WW2 would have made a way better ending.
There's no big explosion here, no reconciled love,
just a rough, empty surface: a closed book on fire.
-Steven Breyak, Sweeps Week from Alternate Endings


The good stars met in your horoscope.
Made you of spirit and fire and dew.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
Until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
--Richard Siken

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell:
Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,
Yet grace must still look so.
- Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
-Frank O'Hara, "Steps"


You may forget but

Let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us
-Sappho

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers. ~ Basho

And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or goodbye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you know. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life.
--Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

Comments

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

Oh, I really like the Atwood poem.