William Hazlitt: "Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own." (*)
Philip Larkin: "Envoi"
The question of poetry, of course,
Is difficult: some say a poet should
Mix with his fellows, be a social force;
Others say he should be simply good;
Others, that he should be a communist;
Perhaps a scholar, even drive a van;
Or spend his waking hours in being kissed;
Or all these, and become a Complete man.
//
Myself, I think that poetry is merely
The Ego's protest at the world's contempt,
And that there are no normal poets, really.
Therefore, if as tonight, dear, he should move
In motions of spending and the acts of love,
He has lived his poem; all his power is spent. (*)
Charles Simic: A poem is like a girl at a party who gets to kiss everybody. No, a poem
is a secret shared by people who have never met each other. Compared to
the other arts, poets spend most of their time scratching their heads in
the dark. That’s why the travel they prefer is going to the kitchen to
see if there is any baked ham and cold beer left in the fridge. (*)
John Steinbeck: Tom wrote secret poetry,
and in those days it was only sensible to keep it secret. The poets
were pale emasculates, and Western men held them in contempt. Poetry was
a symptom of weakness, of degeneracy and decay. To read it was to court
catcalls. To write it was to be suspected and ostracised. Poetry was a
secret vice, and properly so. (*)
Walt Whitman: Life...unrhymed poetry. (*) William Carlos Williams:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there. (*)
Randy Cohen: What is benign in one setting can be toxic in another.
(Chainsaws: useful in the forest, dubious at the dinner table. Or as Dr. Johnson put it in a pre-chainsaw age, “A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.”) (*)
Malcolm Gladwell: "I have two parallel things I'm interested in:
collecting interesting stories and collecting interesting research. What
I'm looking for is where they overlap."
Jean-Luc Godard: It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.
Jonathan Lethem: Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul--let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances--is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? "The Ecstasy of Influence" Harper's Magazine, Feb. 2007, p. 68.
Pablo Neruda: "Writers are always interchanging in some way, just as the air we breathe
doesn’t belong to one place. The writer is always moving from house to
house: he ought to change his furniture. Some writers feel uncomfortable
at this. I remember that Federico García Lorca was always asking me to
read my lines, my poetry, and yet in the middle of my reading, he would
say, “Stop, stop! Don’t go on, lest you influence me!" (Paris Review, The Art of Poetry 14)
Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it's by standing on ye shoulders of Giants," in a letter to Robert Hooke
John Padgett and Woody Powell: Emergence of novelty is not virgin birth. Everything, even the origin of life itself, is a combination and recombination of other things in its accessible context... Understanding the emergence of objects, therefore, is a matter of deconstructing objects into the transformational flows that construct and sustain them. Viewed from the perspective of flows, objects are the folding and refolding of their context – namely, of the ecology or network of other objects with which those objects interact... For example, stability of the human body through time means not mechanical fixity of parts; it means organic reproduction of parts in flux. Viewed as chemical reactions, we are vortexes in the material life that wends through us all. (*) (forthcoming The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Princeton U. Press)
Janwillem van de Wetering: The Daimyo : "What would I be? A good question. I have no answer. My mind is clouded by the countless thoughts with which I have identified myself and which have all left their traces." (*) (an interview)
Harrison White: You can be assured that, for each idea, quite a number
of substantial, and often independent, discussions and implementations
could be cited: Ideas that have any importance, any impact, do, after
all, come in company, not as isolates, and the essayist is mostly a
transcriber of ideas abroad in his networks" (1994a, p. 4) in Emirbayer 1997
Eric Hoffer: Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things, have even discovered them over and over again and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways. 1960, from his notebooks.
Note: Many of these are from the website of Elisabeth Fosslien. Look for a justification of this move later.
Kingsley Amis: For once in his life, Dixon resolved to bet on his luck. What luck had come his way in the past he'd distrusted, stingily held on to until the chance of losing his initial gain was safely past. It was time to stop doing that *.
Mawi Asgedom: Like any dream, you have to start believing that you can do it. You don't quite know how it will turn out but you start anyway. Discipline is your best friend. If you have the discipline to write two pages every day, after 150 days, you have 300 pages. I actually use this in my speeches to show students how important discipline is. Something small, writing two pages, if done repeatedly can become something big, a 300-page book. That's my motto for success: dream big, do small, every day.
Saul Bellow: what he preached at me...the thing to do: not to dissolve in bewilderment of choices but to make myself hard, like himself, and learn how to stay with the necessary, undistracted by the trimmings *... A description: wild internal disorder, or even with the fact that he was quivering. And why? Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible... At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you enjoyed delicious old-fashioned values? You - you yourself are a child of the mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs. On top of that, an injured heart, and raw gasoline poured on the nerves... The busy bee has no time for sorrow *.
Samuel Clemens: Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than the ones you did do... so throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails... explore, dream, discover.
Benjamin Disraeli: Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
Seth Godin: Comments and Twitter are like a Fresnel lens. You can use them to focus attention if you’re very disciplined and very good, or, if you’re like me, you’ll end up finding your energy and attention diffused into a maelstrom, lost to the winds of inanity, anger or trivia. * The first thing you do when you sit down at the computer: Let me guess: check the incoming. Check email or traffic stats or messages from your boss. Check the tweets you follow or the FB status of friends. You've just surrendered not only a block of time but your freshest, best chance to start something new...the first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals, not to hear how others have reacted/responded/insisted to what happened yesterday * .
Samuel Huntington: Some people may say that people in glass houses should not throw stones... I do not mind performing a useful function by throwing stones and thus encouraging others to move out of their glass houses, once I have moved out of mine (jstor p. 304).
Rudyard Kipling: [Lurgan Sahib] 'By doing it many times over till it is done perfectly--for it is worth doing' *.
Somerset Maugham: In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change -- change and the excitement of the unforeseen (*).
Haruki Murakami: [Colonel Sanders] "We're talking about a revelation here...a revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That's what's critical" (255)...
[Kafka] "But I've always tried to get stronger."
"That's very important," the brawny one says, "Very important--to do your best to get stronger" (386).
Janwillem van de Wetering: Good luck comes to those who keep trying.
