Emerson's essay Circles       Emily Dickinson ooo     The Script for Star Wars "A New Hope"     
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He who knows not that he knows not - is a fool. Shun him.
He who knows that he knows not - is seeking. Teach him.
He who knows not that he knows - is asleep. Awake him.
He who knows that he knows - is a wise man. Follow him.

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements in life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about." Charles Kingsley

"Any idiot can face a crisis. It is the day-to-day living that wears you out." Anton Chekhov

"I learned to trust my obsessions. . . . One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life." Robert Bly (1926- ) see citation below

"I think a poem (also) is a dream, a dream which you are willing to share with the community. It happens a writer often doesn't understand a poem until some months after he's written it--just as a dreamer doesn't understand a dream. Being a poet in the United States has meant for me years of confusion, blundering, and self-doubt. The confusion lies in not knowing whether I am writing in the American language or the English or, more exactly, how much of the musical power of Chaucer, Marvell, and Keats can be kept in free verse. Not knowing how to live, or even how to make a living, results in blunders. And the self-doubt comes from living in small towns." Robert Bly (fr. Writer's Almanac Tuesday Dec. 23, 2003)

... Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. -- Carrie Fischer

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) ... (fr. Writer's Almanac Friday Nov. 7, 2003)

For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." Albert Camus, The Stranger. (fr. Writer's Almanac Friday Nov. 7, 2003)

Nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel. -- John Keats fr a letter to a friend (1795-1821)

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself. --Confucius (c. 551-478 BCE)

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes. --Oscar Wilde

How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you -- you leave little bits of yourself
fluttering on the fences -- little rags and shreds of your very life. Katherine Mansfield (fr. Writer's Almanac Tues Oct. 14, 2003)

The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it--to remember, to keep in mind--as they make their way up the hill… If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain--to the end of the story--and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands. --Frank Conroy (fr. Writer's Almanac Wed. Jan 15, 2003)

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency--;the belief that the here and now is all there is. --Allan Bloom

Sometimes it seemed to me ... that each person who passed along the street below, under the light, shouted his secret up to me. -- Sherwood Anderson

...one had the sense of passing through a display of zoological or botanical or entomological extravagances--whiskered, flittering innocent beings, utterly unsuited to the struggle for existence, goggle-eyed, bearing the blank staring expressions of brilliant fish in tropical waters, or insects in flower-mad gardens, or radiant birds flying among ornamental planets. Where there were humans, they seemed mainly to be carriers of jolly genitalia. --Arthur Coleman Danto
"Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical Present" talking about a political painting by Miro

Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. From "My Lost City" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (fr. Writer's Almanac Wed. September 24, 2003)

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. from The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald (ditto)

Well I think that you've got to be prepared to write a load of nonsense to start with and then you can tart it up. The business of getting going, getting started, is enormously important, and this can be physical. Solvitur Ambulando as the Romans used to say, which means 'the solution comes through walking. Colin Dexter mystery writer (fr Writer's Almanac Mon. September 29, 2003)

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. Samuel Adams patriot and rabel-rouser (fr Writer's Almanac Sat. September 27, 2003)

Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember but the story. Tim O'Brien journalist, writer, Vietnam Vet (fr. Writer's Almanac Wednesday October 1, 2003)

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common--this is my symphony. -William Henry Channing, clergyman, reformer (1810-1884)

Shahrazad, who has been better known in the West as Scheherazade, triumphs because she is endlessly inventive and keeps her head. The stories in "The Thousand and One Nights" (interchangeably known as 'The Arabian Nights') are stories about storytelling without ever ceasing to be stories about love and life and death and money and food and other human necessities. Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. -- A. S. Byatt

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. --John Donne, poet (1573-1631)

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. -Aldous Huxley

The world, we are told, was made especially for man--a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? ---John Muir, Naturalist and explorer (1838-1914)

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." -- H.L.Mencken

Write the bad things that are done to you in the sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble. -Arabian wisdom

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? --Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate (1918- )