No lyric poems live long or please many people which are written by drinkers of water.
—Horace, 20 BC
Archive
Quotes
When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.
—Chinua Achebe, 1960A functioning police state needs no police.
—William S. Burroughs, 1959It’s easy to be independent when you’ve got money. But to be independent when you haven’t got a thing—that’s the Lord’s test.
—Mahalia Jackson, 1966There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
—Walter Bagehot, 1863The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing
I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate!
—Willa Cather, 1915No poems can please long, nor live, that are written by water drinkers.
—Horace, 35 BCDo what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
—Aleister Crowley, 1904A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.
—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978