“Paradise Lost" was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully. - Robert Hass
Interesting. I find it almost impossible to read poetry, even contemporary American stuff, but when I hear it, it's another matter entirely. When I was in high school, my English class went to see the then-poet laureate of the United States, Howard Nemerov, do a reading of his works and suddenly I got it... but reading the poems of his that I didn't hear? Not so much.
That was Groucho. His other memorable quote about clubs came from an incident where his daughter Melinda wanted to join a club that had a swimming pool. The club wouldn't accept Jews for membership. Groucho wrote them, "Well, my daughter is only half Jewish. Can't she go in up to her waist?"
The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth. - P. J. O'Rourke
I'm with the masses on this! I've already got a sorta style and a couple of feelings. Gimme what I don't have.
It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman. - Alexandre Dumas
Who, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances. - P. J. O'Rourke
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." ― G. Michael Hopf.