However carved up
KAY RYAN, "The Best of It"
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul. - Joyce Carol Oates
Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books. - Marguerite Yourcenar
One must be an inventor to read well. - Emerson
For me, words on a page give the world coherence. - Alberto Manguel
My own life seems to have been a series of jerky, aimless zigzags, spermatozoic, instinctive, irrational, an inborn error of metabolism over which I have no control, only redeemed by the gift of language. - Richard Selzer
If our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative. - Adrienne Rich
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
My worry is not the absence of presence in writing but the presence of absence in presence. - Charles Bernstein
I will lodge where I have a mind. - Robert Louis Stevenson
The mind is
a terrible thing
to keep chaste.
-Jeramy Dodds
The love of god is apparently the only one we stand since we always want to be loved in spite of ourselves. - Albert Camus
Oh, life is bitter /
Ever since another god has harnessed us to his cross! - Arthur Rimbaud
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. - James Baldwin
Isn't an agnostic just an atheist without balls? - Stephen Colbert
My holy of holies is the human body. - Anton Chekhov
The body has never believed in progress. Its religion is not the future but the present. - Mike Hoolboom
We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation. - Lily Tomlin
Grasp the good fortune that the ground on
which you stand cannot be any bigger than
the two feet planted on it. - Franz Kafka
One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters… But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk. - Charles Baudelaire
When you love something as intimately fragile as your own body, you don’t want to hurt anyone. - Martin Amis
The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. - Montaigne
...such a brave and lovely act it is to let the body celebrate. - Tom Spanbauer
We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting. - Kahlil Gibran
Chance favours the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur
Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure. - Douglas Coupland
“Debussy,/ when he felt his opera going nowhere,/ let it.’’ - Dean Young
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. - William Blake
The basis of optimism is sheer terror. - Oscar Wilde
Silence is so accurate. - Mark Rothko
The way up and the way down are the same way. - Heraclitus
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. - G.K. Chesterton
The perfect is the enemy of the good. - Voltaire
Try again. Fail again. Fail better. - Samuel Beckett
Everybody has a plan until you hit them. - Mike Tyson
Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. - Jane Wagner
"She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris." - Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Loneliness is solitude with a problem. - Maggie Nelson
It all seems stupid now, but was natural then. - M. F. K. Fisher
"I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
She who laughs, lasts. - Kate Clinton
I'll die as I've lived, with a book in my hand. - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
My library was dukedom enough. - William Shakespeare
Read in order to live. - Flaubert
