Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947)
In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Tag: FTLOW
Frank Delaney On Poets
Frank Delaney (October 24, 1942 -)
The people we call “poets,” by which I mean true, real poets — they are merely very keen listeners who have learned to recognize when a poem is dropping by. Then they copy down what the poem is telling them in their heads. After that, they tidy up the writing, ask their wives, sisters or daughters to type it out for them and so the poem is finished, next to be seen on the pages of some august publication in the Northern Hemisphere where they pay you minus tuppence per line and hope you don’t visit them naked roaring for more cash.
The thing about true poets is … they never have to wait. No sooner do they listen out, than a poem swoops down, whispers something to the top of their heads and they feel it flowing into their brain, down along their arms, into their fingers and out onto the page in black letters.
Poems are like angels. They visit often, but you have to be watching out for them and you have to believe in them to benefit from their gifts.
Arthur Koestler On Living Your Life
Arthur Koestler (September 05, 1905 – March 01, 1983)
Everybody has a given amount of calories to burn up — you either burn them up by living or by creating. You can’t burn the same calories both ways. You make poetry out of your unhappiness, and you might argue that you can also make poetry out of your happiness. But, why should you make poetry when you are happy instead of living it out? Creativity is a secondary expression. The primary expression is living.
Xialou Guo On Love
Xiaolu Guo (1973 -)
“Love,” this English word: like other English words, it has tense. “Loved” or “will love” or “have loved.” All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is (ai). It has no tense, no past, no future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.
Rainer Maria Rilke On God
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 04, 1875 – December 29, 1926)
You are the deep innerness of all things. The last word that can never be spoken. To each of us you reveal yourself differently: to the ship as a coastline, to the shore as a ship.
Ortega Y Gasset On Interests
Ortega Y Gasset (May 09, 1883 – October 18, 1955)
So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don’t find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.
John Muir On Nature
John Muir (April 21, 1838 – December 24, 1914)
One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.
