—WE ALWAYS WANTED MONEY NOW THE MONEY’S NOT THE SAME

 

 

…“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.” Sylvia Plath

 

“Everything, I know dies, but this does not grieve me right now. Because at this moment everything is so brilliantly, almost ridiculously, alive.” Karen Friedland

 

… “It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.” Doris Lessing

 

…“At this point I think my body is like an old car. Another dent ain’t gonna make a whole lot of difference. At best it’s a reminder that you’re still alive and lucky as hell. Another tattoo, another thing you did, another place you’ve been.” Anthony Bourdain

 

…“We are always telling two stories about ourselves: the one about who we want to believe we are, and the one about who we know ourselves to be.” Steve Almond.

 

…“ She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice. It was supposed to make you feel something.” Ray Kay

 

… “Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.”  Samuel Beckett

 

…“The past I never dead. It’s not even the past.” Faulkner

 

…“Art would be useless if the world were perfect.”  Andrei Tarkovsky

 

…“People confuse me. Food doesn't.” Anthony Bourdain

 

…“I have always loved a window, especially an open one.” Wendell Berry

 

…“ Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” Kurt Vonnegut 

 

…“Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.” Mary Oliver

 

… I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s - my madness would not be an escape from “reality.”—Frida Kahlo

 

…“I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.”  Jorie Graham

 

…”Perhaps wisdom. . . is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” Anthony Bourdain

 

… "I made a wish on a sliver of moonlight, a sly grin, and a bowl full of stars." Tom Waits, Lucinda

 

…“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.” James Baldwin

 

… “Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

– Li-Young Lee

 

…“Isn’t it funny to imagine hope not much more than a toddler, wielding rage in its fist like a cudgel?” Dianne Seuss