Sedulia's Quotations

Don't say Islam is intolerant, or else

Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.

  --Tasnim Aslam, Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman

Today is the first day of Ramadan.

Zora Neale Hurston: There are years that ask questions and years that answer

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

       --Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

Wheelock: A planet doesn't explode of itself, said the Martian astronomer

"A planet doesn’t explode of itself," said drily
the Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air.
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
intelligent beings must have been living there."

        --"Earth," by John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978)

Jacques Chirac meets George W. Bush

Il m'a fixé d'un regard noir, comme si j'étais le diable.

[He stared at me with a black look, as if I were the devil.]

  --Jacques Chirac on his meeting with George W. Bush, as reported on Radio France Info

Shota Rustaveli: Poetry is above all else a branch of wisdom

Poetry is above all else a branch of wisdom,
godly in source and sense, sustenance for the listener;
still more does it please the virtuous man who hears it.
Verse is good at saying long things shortly.

        --From the Prologue to "The Knight in the Panther Skin" ("Vepkhistqaosani") by Shota Rustaveli (ca 1200), from Georgia. From The Elek Book of Oriental Verse (1979), Gen. Ed. Keith Bosley.

Sigerson Clifford: He made a noose of music

The Ballad of the Tinker's Wife

...At Caher fair she saw him
as she was hurrying by,
and the song that he was singing
would lure lark from the sky.

Her footsteps slowed to standing,
she stood and stared that day;
he made a noose of music
and pulled her heart away....

        --Sigerson Clifford (1913-1985), in Ballads of a Bogman

Nikki Giovanni: There is nothing normal about happiness.

There is nothing normal about happiness.

            --Nikki Giovanni

Scott: Breathes there the man, with soul so dead

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
who never to himself hath said,
"This is my own, my native land!"
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
as home his footsteps he hath turned,
from wandering on a foreign strand!

        --Walter Scott (1771-1832 ) in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805)

Faiz Ahmad Faiz: My Guests. The door opens on my sadness

The door opens
on my sadness;
there they come, my guests.
There she is, the evening
to lay a carpet of despair.
There goes the night
to speak of pain to the stars.
Here comes the morning
with its shining scalpel
to open the wound of memory.
Then there is afternoon
hiding whips of flame in its sleeve.
All these are my guests
who come to see me day and night.
But when they come
and when they go,
I do not know.
My thoughts are always
drifting homeward,
holding doubts and suspicions
asking many questions.

       --Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984), tr. by Mahmood Jamal, ed. of The Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry (1986)

Dr Johnson: Americans are a race of convicts

Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

   --Samuel Johnson on Americans, at the time of the Revolutionary War, quoted in Boswell's Life (1791)