Quotes

The people of New Orleans weren't just abandoned during the hurricane. They were abandoned long ago -- to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.
-- Barack Obama

I have a grandson who's already received a Purple Heart in Baghdad, and they just put him back to duty. One Purple Heart wasn't enough... I just wish George Bush would step up to the microphone and say, "Folks, it's about oil."
-- Merle Haggard, the country legend who wrote the pro-Vietnam War song 'The Fightin' Side of Me.'

It's the oil, stupid.
-- Bob Herbert, NY Times

But this war never ends. It just goes on and on, in different places.
-- Laurie Anderson, The End of the Moon

Nothing remains but what rises above the abyss of today's monstrous problems, as above every abyss of every time: the wing-beat of the spirit and the creative word.
-- Martin Buber

...it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog nosing before you and a dog nosing behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart.
-- John Millington Synge

I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They'd serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, vibrate with life, and stay up all night.
-- Amy Hempel, in In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried

A mature woman in Europe is considered sexually powerful.
-- Catherine Deneuve, NY Times

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.
-- Katharine Hepburn

Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.
-- Audrey Niffenegger, in The Time Traveler's Wife

The purpose of human life is to create ~ to penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution.
-- Paul Klee

If an idea in a poem is too complicated and too arcane, the poem begins to lose its emotional power. Conversely, if the poem is too emotional, its intelligence will diminish. A good poet intuitively knows how to strike a balance between thoughts and emotions.
-- Ha Jin, in Crazed

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle

It seemed to me... writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege. Augustus Caesar had sent... Ovid into exile. Why would Caesar fear Ovid, except that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry?
-- Tobias Wolff, in Old School

I believe the truth is we form a family with other poets, living and dead, or we risk going nowhere.
-- Philip Levine in So Ask: Essays, Conversations and Interviews

Music can't be owned by musicians. It comes through the universe. At best, we're skilled presenters.
-- Serj Tankian, singer with Systems of a Down

The conventional wisdom is that a singer sings because they're feeling something strongly and the song is the way to express that. I think it's the other way around. The song is the lever or the tool that allows the emotion to be extracted.
-- David Byrne, singer

Singing is 90% brains and 10% voice.
-- Marilyn Horne

All these guys play so fast, but the guy that wins is the guy that plays the melody and reaches the heart.
-- Les Paul

I was contemptuous of "facts" for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.
-- Joyce Carol Oates, in The Girl with the Blackened Eye

Diamonds are magic, she said, and that is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved.
-- Charles Baxter, in Gryphon

I don't know what I think until I write it down.
-- Joan Didion

When I was 11, I began keeping a diary. Most people don't need proof of their existence. But I always needed that. Being alive is not enough for me.
-- Agnes Jaoul, Parisian filmmaker

There is always a delightful sense of movement, vibration and life, ... color and luminosity (in the work of Claude Monet).
-- Theodore Robinson, 1892 in The Century

I only know how to do two things. Garden and paint.
-- Claude Monet