Sweatshirt Poesy

A poet is a fellow who
spends his time thinking
about what it is that’s
wrong, and although he
knows he can never quite
find out what this wrong
is, he goes right on
thinking it out
and writing it down.
A poet is a blind optimist.
The world is against him for
many reasons. But the
poet persists. He believes
that he is on the right track,
no matter what any of his
fellow men say. In his
eternal search for truth, the
poet is alone.
He tries to be timeless in a
society built on time.

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

- Night and Day

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.

- If on a winter’s night a traveler

Men like women who write. Even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.

Truth from Marguerite Duras. What man wouldn’t like a woman who writes?

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sitting on the hill he felt young and stupid. And then sad that he had not until this afternoon found out that on very rare occasions life will offer up something as full and wonderful as anything the imagination can muster.

- Jim Harrison, Farmer

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one… . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil… . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

The truth is that only gold ore can be turned into gold; only poetry into poems.

- Robert Graves, The White Goddess