Jottings from the notebook

Aim therefore at no less than all the world.

        -- Milton, Paradise Regained. (Spoken by Satan, of course.)

The earth turns over, our side feels the cold.

        -- WH Auden

The deepest trap is to think about where I haven’t been, instead of where I’m going.

“Why is it always the ones who can’t fulfill them who have the power to get your hopes up?”

“They’re your hopes; bet them on a higher number.”

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

-- Raymond Chandler

The harder you push it away, the tighter it clings to you.

A poet once told me that originally the poet’s job was to name the things of this world.  In a way, I am trying to name things with my emotions.

        -- Lili Taylor

The highest purpose of poetry is to keep us from listening to fools.

-- Leopold Froehlich

“He says hello like the word could unzip the back of my dress.”

That roar which lies on the other side of silence.

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

You know you do something right when you lose something.

        -- Tift Merritt

Being creative and being marketable: a bull surrounded by barbed wire.

My weapon against the world is another vision of the world.

        -- Jorge Teillier

As a writer, I think he chews out loud.

         --- Peter DeVries

Love is the only thing we have the right to be totally selfish about.

Marriage: a minimum of temptation with a maximum of opportunity.

        (after Shaw)

Marriage: a sort of friendship recognized by the police.

        -- Robert Louis Stevenson

“I’m sorry I never got back to you.”

“But you did get back to me--silence is also a response.”

Good things always come to an end; bad things must be stopped.

        (after Kim Newman)

I only see the trail when I look back.

Disco’s Dead And You’re Next

        (one day I’ll write a thriller with this title)

New York City is the capital of a country that has no borders.

Only a banker’s wife can show you Hell.

        -- one sentence review, Dante’s Inferno.

Blondes all have something to hide, brunettes all have something to prove, and the only sane redheads are orangutans.

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.

        -- Tennyson, Idylls of the King.

“You’re like the moon.  I know you have a dark side, but the way you always face me, I can’t see it.”

My soul and the internet: a giant weighed down by snowflakes.

He who would flee from bad taste is riding for a fall.

        -- Pablo Neruda

The ones who are dead inside live the longest.

It is the second job of literature to create myth.  But its first job is to destroy that myth.

        --Kenzaburo Oe

This body where I live: my dear assassin.

When Lear is mad, he speaks prose.

        -- Joshua Mehigan