Laissez-Fairy Tale
On Creativity, Thought, and Imagination
"Inspiration may be the revelation of something completely new, but it is
also the rediscovery of something always true." Robert Grudin
"Our heads are crowded with ideas and associations in a way that may be
likened to a random card index file, voluminous and untidy, but
cross-referenced way down into the subconscious." Eugene Raskin
"Inventive people live with an absurd but indispensable trust that the
next idea that comes to them may be totally new." Robert Grudin
"...There is something quietly suicidal about destroying the work of
one's own hands." Robert Grudin
"In a society of technicians and entreprenuers, of consumers protected
qually from nuclear disaster and body odor, there is little room for
tragic vision." Robert Grudin
"What takes root in my oragamibrain?" Einsturzende Neubauten
Writing and Other Expressions
"I write because it is the only was I am willing to survive." William
Styron
On Men, Women, Life and Beauty
"There are many wise men, but on the other hand, not one stupid tree."
Paavo Haa Vikko
"...From this point of view, Beauty oddly resembles gravity: like
gravity, beauty is a force whose existence is inferred from apparent
effects." Robert Grudin
"Know yourself. Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence
that you are wonderful." Ann Landers
"Throughout history, admission to Hell depended on one criterion...you
must belong to a group some other group believes is heading there."
James Morrow
"Oh well, we vomit and move on to the next meal." Lorena Ho
"To be truly open to any experience, the mind must be open to all."
Robert Grudin
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of
Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent
have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
Stephen J. Gould :The Panda's Thumb
"There is no difference between being raped and being run over by a truck
except that afterwards men ask if you enjoyed it."
Marge Piery : "Rape Poem"
"It's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike.
Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the
squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; most people are snobs."
e.e. cummings : into to Collected Poems
"The two of them were innocent. Everyone was innocent. The universe was
a place of blameless urges and morally neutral hyrdraulics."
James Morrow : Only Begotten Daughter
From Poetry (and Prose)
"This is the long tunnel
of wanting you."
Erica Jong : "The Long Tunnel of Wanting You"
"there are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of
them is death."
Kenneth Patchen : "And What With the Blunders"
"I see the monuments
I near the rest of my life.
I Take what's left of Picasso's hand."
Clark Coolidge : "Paris..."
"For all those whose beauty
stirred their torturers to fury;
& for all those whose ugliness did the same."
Erica Jong : "For All Those Who Died"
"...for life's not a paragraph
and death, i think, is no parenthesis."
e.e. cummings : "since feeling is first"
"And how much courage it requires to get up in the
morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates
you!"
Franz Wright : "Entry In An Unknown Hand"
"I was the poet
of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch
phonebooks..."
C.D. Wright : "Our Dust"
"...Only an actual randomness
never admits a mistake."
Douglas Crase : "True Solar Holiday"
"These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century and leave him there."
Edwin Brock : "five ways to kill a man"
"...fishing
for her voice in a deep mirrorless pond..
...(brighter than pennies in water & more wished upon)."
Erica Jong : "His Tuning of the Night"
"I'll make a perfect body, said God,
and invent ways to make it fail."
Stephen Dunn : "Letting the Puma Go"
"Love is a softness
the weak cannot afford,
& sex a Darwinian bribe."
Erica Jong : "The Death of Goddesses"
My Own Quotes
or never know what nonsense today will be truth tomorrow
"Why should someone spend their time doing this, and how can I be just
like him(them)?"
"For writers, rain sometimes falls upwards."
"Memories don't ferment, they figment."
"I'm building a fuckin' Utopia and I'm burning it to the ground."
matte elsbernd - melsbern@tuba.aix.calpoly.edu