Exist in plural

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. Neither truth, when seen alone, is our solution, for our reality exists in plural."
-Jonah Lehrer

Within reach

“Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom."
-Mignon McLaughlin

stupendous

"Why was I given a toy train if not / to stage stupendous wrecks?"
-Dean Young

Eureka

"Science is basically a lot of fighting."
-my physiological psychology professor last Thursday

Marshmallow

"We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”
-Walter Mischel, creator of the marshmallow test

Kangaroos

"Kangaroos can't hop backwards.  It wasn't funny, but you learned something."
-Daniel Tosh

Reach for the sky

"The text is simply the hand with which the artist-child reaches for the moon and so learns to clutch a useful, but nearer, object."
-Declan Kiberd, "Ulysses, Newspapers, and Modernism," Irish Classics

The part of my brain now atrophied

If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the part of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.

-- Charles Darwin, from his autobiography

Versifying

"As to an occasional copy of verses, there are few men who have leisure to read, and are possessed of any music in their souls, who are not capable of versifying on some ten or twelve occasions during their natural lives: at a proper conjunction of the stars.  There is no harm in taking advantage of such occasions."

-Edward Fitzgerald, in a letter to Bernard Barton

Scholarship

"A las nueve o diez noches comprendió con alguna amargura que nada podía esperar de aquellos alumnos que aceptaban con pasivided su doctrina y sí de aquellos que arriesgaban, a veces, una contradicción razonable.  Los primeros, aunque dignos de amor y de buen afecto, no podían ascender a individuos; los últimos preexistían un poco más."
-Jorge Luis Borges, "Las ruinas circulares"

After nine or ten nights, he understood with a certain sorrow that he could expect nothing of those students who accepted his doctrine with passivity, but that he could from those who sometimes risked to contradict him reasonably.  The former, though worthy of love and affection, couldn't ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed a bit more.

"That is a nice short version, you wanna pick it up?"

"Was it too short?  Well, if I feel like my song is sung, I don't care if it's short.  And I feel like my song is sung."

-Johnny Cash, after singing "You are my Sunshine" on Cash Unearthed

If you have no Oscar Wilde, we won't Ezra Pound

"We need to make books cool again.  If you go home with somebody and they don't have good books, don't fuck them."
-John Waters

Overambitious and immeasurable

"Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature.  Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement."
-Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the New Millennium

Dancing lessons

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
-Kurt Vonnegut

Well...

"Well, that's what we want.  We want people to shit themselves."
-Britt Daniel (of Spoon)

Worst way to die

"I am dying by inches from not having anybody to talk to of insects."
-Charles Darwin, age 18 at Cambridge in a letter to his cousin

Throw everything in the world

"You pricks can throw everything in the world, and your girlfriend will still love me.”

-Iggy Pop, in response to audience members throwing bottles, cans, etc. at the stage during the Stooges’ last performance, Detroit, 1974

Last words during that performance:

"You nearly killed me, but you missed again, so you'll have to try next week."

Nombrarte

No el poema de tu ausencia,

sólo un dibujo, una grieta en un muro,

algo en el viento, un sabor amargo.

-Alejandra Pizarnik, "Nombrarte"

My rough translation:

"Naming you"

Not the poem of your absence,

only a drawing, a crack in a wall,

something in the wind, a bitter taste.

Life

"[I]t is a salient feature of human life, as the novels present it, that it is lived only once, and in one direction."
-Martha Nussbaum, "Love's Knowledge"

Surprise & Delight

“If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you’ve written a poem about two dogs fucking.”

-Gerald Stern

I found this in a George Saunders essay.  The point being, good writing should take the writer (and reader) somewhere they didn't expect to arrive.