quotes from classic

Be not ashamed of thy virtues honor's a good brooch to wear in a man's hat at all times.

more quotes from Benjamin Jonson

We are persons of quality, I assure you, and women of fashion, and come to see and to be seen.

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Wise child, didst hastily return And mad'st thy mother's womb thine urn....

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There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear

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"Like architecture, poetry is an art that creates habitable structures within uninhabitable expanses through the use of repetition, proportion, and pattern. The poet, like the architect, is joyfully and painfully aware of both the provisional nature, and the complete necessity, of such habitable structures." --From an Interview in FULCRUM Magazine, 2005

more quotes from Annie Finch

anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.

more quotes from June Jordan

If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.

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Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather.

more quotes from June Jordan

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic/ape/suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

more quotes from June Jordan

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

more quotes from June Jordan

... the victim accommodates to power. The victim doesn't want anymore [sic] trouble.

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Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ...

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A poet can read. A poet can write. A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white in Wisconsi...

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Poetry is what the heart says when the mouth can’t speak

more quotes from Gary R. Ferris

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.

more quotes from James Joyce

Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

more quotes from James Joyce

When I heard the word stream uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.

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While you have a thing it can be taken from you... but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

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Studies indicate that the one quality all successful people have is persistence. They're willing to spend more time accomplishing a task and to perservere in the face of many difficult odds. There's a very positive relationship between people's ability to accomplish any task and the time they're willing to spend on it.

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Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins commited in previous lives.

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