Sedulia's Quotations

Marge Piercy: Living with the brakes on

Beauty I would suffer for

Last week a doctor told me
anemic after an operation
to eat: ordered to indulgence
given a papal dispensation to run
amok in Zabar's.
Yet I know that in
two weeks, a month I
will have in my nostrils
not the savor of rendering goosefat,
not the burnt sugar of caramel topping
the Saint-Honore cake, not the pumpernickel
bearing up the sweet butter, the sturgeon
but again the scorched wire,
burnt rubber smell
of willpower, living
with the brakes on.

I want to pass into the boudoirs
of Rubens' women. I want to dance
graceful in my tonnage like Poussin nymphs.
Those melon bellies, those vast ripening thighs,
those featherbeds of forearms, those buttocks
placid and gross as hippopotami:
how I would bend myself
to that standard of beauty, how faithfully
would consume waffles and sausage for breakfast
with croissants on the side, how dutifully
I would eat for supper the black bean soup
with madeira, followed by the fish course
the meat course, and the Bavarian cream.
Even at intervals during the day I would
suffer an occasional eclair
for the sake of appearance.

    --Marge Piercy (1936-), in Massachusetts Review, No. l, 1976.

Frank O'Connor on Michael Collins: Genius is a troublesome bedfellow

Genius is a troublesome bedfellow. When it is absent we sigh for it, when it is present we grow weary of its violence and impetuousness. O'Higgins once said, "I have done nothing without asking myself what Michael Collins would have done under the circumstances"-- which is as though I were to say, "I have written nothing without asking myself what Shakespeare would have written."

What can normality do but keep the bed warm till her troublesome bedfellow, his night-wanderings over, returns, and she, forgetting how she had called God to witness her sighs and groans at his betrayal, looks again with alarm at his rugged frame, catches the breath scented with wine and that subtle odour in the hair which suggests strange contacts; till the eternal, restless marriage is renewed, and new generations, new ways of thought, are in the womb again?

     --Frank O'Connor, pseudonym of Michael Donovan (1903-1966), in The Big Fellow (1937)

Laurie Colwin on finding the right person at last

The Lone Pilgrim sits at the dinner parties of others, partakes, savors, and goes home in a taxi alone.

Those days were spent in quest-- the quest to settle your own life, and now the search has ended. Your imagined happiness is yours. Therefore, you lose your old bearings. On the one side is your happiness and on the other is your past-- the self you were used to, going through life alone, heir to your own experience. Once you commit yourself, everything changes and the rest of your life seems to you like a dark forest on the property you have recently acquired. It is yours, but still you are afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find: a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best. You take one timid step forward, but then you realize you are not alone. You take someone's hand....and strain through the darkness to see ahead.

        --Laurie Colwin (1944-1992) in The Lone Pilgrim

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)

Nikki Giovanni: There is nothing normal about happiness.

There is nothing normal about happiness.

            --Nikki Giovanni

Czelaw Milosz: As late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

        --Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), "Late Ripeness" in Second Space: New Poems (2005)

Barbara Kingsolver: Happy people have found a use for themselves

Happy people have found a use for themselves, like a good tool.

    --Barbara Kingsolver (1955-), quoted by Mary Pipher, Writing to Change the World

Anne Frank on changing the world

How wonderful it is that no one has to wait, but can start right now to change the world.

     --Anne Frank (1929-1942) in an essay, quoted by Mary Pipher,Writing to Change the World

 

Grace Murray Hopper: A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for

A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

     --Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), computer pioneer and mother of the computer language COBOL

Solzhenitsyn on the line separating good and evil

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

    --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), in The Gulag Archipelago