George Orwell

Old Benjamin, the donkey, seemed quite unchanged since the Rebellion. He did his work in the same slow obstinate way as he had done it in Jones's time, never shirking and never volunteering for extra work either. About the Rebellion and its results he would express no opinion. When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey," and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer.
Animal Farm (1945), Chapter 3

George Orwell

The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades. There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
Animal Farm (1945), Chapter 1

Noam Chomsky

When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality which is beyond belief. In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on topics such as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do.
The Chomsky Reader (1987, p. 33)

William Shakespeare

When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that.
The Winter's Tale, Florizel, scene iv

Mahmoud Darwish

Viewpoint
by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

The difference between narcissus
and sunflower
is a point of view: the first
stares at his image in water
and says, there is no I but I
and the second looks
at the sun and says I am
what I worship.
And at night, difference shrinks
And interpretation widens.

Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah. Appears in The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 14 · September 25, 2008.

floccinaucinihilipilification

A coinage ... combining a number of roughly synonymous Latin stems. Latin flocci, from floccus, a wisp or piece of wool + nauci, from naucum, a trifle + nihili, from nihilum, nothing + pili, from pilus, a hair, something insignificant (all therefore having the sense of "worthless" or "nothing") + -fication.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/floccinaucinihilipilification

J. D. Salinger

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Holden Caulfield's opening statement in The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

William Faulkner

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
Unsourced

William Faulkner

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
Unsourced

William Faulkner

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)

William Shakespeare

...Great floods have flown
From simple sources; and great seas have dried,
When miracles have by the greatest been denied.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises.
All's Well That Ends Well, Helena, scene i

Flannery O'Connor

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

Giordano Bruno

In a dialogue that Bruno wrote in the 1570s he imagines his home town of Nola in which fate has decreed...
that Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl her hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio’s foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim’s progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. . . . Antonio Savolino’s bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro’s dog. . . . Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants, and if he should blaspheme for that reason, I mean for him to be punished thus: tonight his soup shall be too salty and taste of smoke, he shall fall and break his wine flask.
Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) was an Italian philosopher, priest, cosmologist, and occultist. A statue of Bruno was erected in Campo de' Fiori in Rome in 1889.

Salvatore Quasimodo

[Untitled]
by Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the earth
transfixed by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it is evening.

William Shakespeare

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, Act V, Scene v.
Day after day after day. The days go slowly, up to the end of time. All the days in the past did no good except to bring fools through their lives up to the times of their deaths. Get blown out, flame of life! Life is short. Life is only a walking shadow. Life is only a poor actor, who walks around on the stage for a short time, and after that no one hears him any more. Life is a story that an idiot tells, full of sound and fury, but not meaning anything.
http://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

John Bradford

There but by the grace of God go I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bradford

Theodore Roethke

The Meadow Mouse
by Theodore Roethke

1
In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?--
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

Abraham Lincoln

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
September 30, 1859, 'Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin'.

George Orwell

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
Nineteen Eighty-Four

Mark Twain

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Unknown

Brad Leithauser

Old Globe
by Brad Leithauser

For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say

a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born—ninety years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear

both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray

and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.

*

Her eye fell at random. "Formosa," she read.
"Now that's pretty. Is it there today?"
A pause. "It is," my brother said,

"though now it's called Taiwan."
She looked apologetic. "I sometimes forget..."
"Like Sri Lanka," I added. "Which was Ceylon."

And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last ninety years? Burma, Baluchistan,

Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay...

*

She was in a middle place—
her fifties—when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.

Who could believe those men—in their black noon—
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,

and overheard a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,

the gift received today—
the globe she'd so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.

*

Finally, there's cake: nine candles in a ring.
...Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing

to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, "Now make a wish before
you blow them out." She says, "I don't see—"

stops. Then mildly protests: "But they look so nice."
We laugh at her—and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.

Well—what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?

Jane Kramer

Archeology, as it is practiced today in nearly every country with an interest in shaping a historical identity, falls somewhere between a hard science - "facts" that can be ascertained by dating, testing, and inscription experts - and an interpretive social science whose "facts" have traditionally derived from ancient texts and their mapping and attribution clues.
'The Petition', The New Yorker, April 14, 2008, Vol. 84, Issue 9.

Ted Hughes

Crow's Account of the Battle
by Ted Hughes

There was this terrific battle.
The noise was as much
As the limits of possible noise could take.
There were screams higher groans deeper
Than any ear could hold.
Many eardrums burst and some walls
Collapsed to escape the noise.
Everything struggled on its way
Through this tearing deafness
As through a torrent in a dark cave.

The cartridges were banging off, as planned,
The fingers were keeping things going
According to excitement and orders.
The unhurt eyes were full of deadliness.
The bullets pursued their courses
Through clods of stone, earth, and skin,
Through intestines pocket-books, brains, hair, teeth
According to Universal laws
And mouths cried "Mamma"
From sudden traps of calculus,
Theorems wrenched men in two,
Shock-severed eyes watched blood
Squandering as from a drain-pipe
Into the blanks between the stars.
Faces slammed down into clay
As for the making of a life-mask
Knew that even on the sun's surface
They could not be learning more or more to the point
Reality was giving it's lesson,
Its mishmash of scripture and physics,
With here, brains in hands, for example,
And there, legs in a treetop.
There was no escape except into death.
And still it went on--it outlasted
Many prayers, many a proved watch
Many bodies in excellent trim,
Till the explosives ran out
And sheer weariness supervened
And what was left looked round at what was left.

Then everybody wept,
Or sat, too exhausted to weep,
Or lay, too hurt to weep.
And when the smoke cleared it became clear
This has happened too often before
And was going to happen too often in the future
And happened too easily
Bones were too like lath and twigs
Blood was too like water
Cries were too like silence
The most terrible grimaces too like footprints in mud
And shooting somebody through the midriff
Was too like striking a match
Too like potting a snooker ball
Too like tearing up a bill
Blasting the whole world to bits
Was too like slamming a door,
Too like dropping in a chair
Exhausted with rage
Too like being blown up yourself
Which happened too easily
With too like no consequences.

So the survivors stayed.
And the earth and the sky stayed.
Everything took the blame.

Not a leaf flinched, nobody smiled.

N. Scott Momaday

The Gift
by N. Scott Momaday

Older, more generous,
We give each other hope.
The gift is ominous:
Enough praise, enough rope.

W. H. Auden

O Tell Me The Truth About Love
by W. H. Auden

Some say that love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
And some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pajamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does it's odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway-guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
it wasn't ever there:
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all it's time at the races,
Or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of it's own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my shoes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.