How could all this happen when there was an ocean?
No one gets over anything.
I need the solidity of a whole book because life often doesn’t cohere for me, I mean my perception of life, and I need to find some bedrock however temporary. It’s like books help me glue the parts of my life together into an acceptable whole.
We think of life as solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid. Old Heraclitus couldn’t have stepped in the same river once, let alone twice.
It’s up to poets to revive the gods.
He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” What a scandal that would be, America’s best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.
Deadly Sins on a long, yellow legal tablet: Pride, Greed, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Anger, Laziness.
Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do they lose their logical mistrust of us.
He picked up Samuel’s saddle as if he were picking up doom herself, doom always owning the furthest, darkest reaches of the feminine gender. Pandora, Medusa, the Bacchantes, the Furies, are female though small goddesses beyond sexual notions. Who reasons death anymore than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty?
I hadn’t noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black.
You don’t have to become what you already are, which is a relief.
A mood can be a mud puddle to be jumped over.
I lean against the rail and think there much be such a thing as beautiful anxiety.
In 20,000 walks you’re bound to learn a little.
To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.
Fast food is zoo food.
Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons of greed and my imperishable stupidity.
I suppose poor Adams never recovered from the suicide of his wife, though it is arguable whether anyone ever truly recovers from anything.
There is a spine of goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy.
The present passes too quickly to notice and I’ve never had a grip on the future, even as an idea.