Bill Holm > Quotes

“We all need new ideas, images, and experiences far more than we need new stoves or cars or computers.”
― Bill Holm, The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland

“Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the aspen tree a month too soon.
No use wind. All you succeed
in doing is making music, the noise
of failure growing beautiful.”
― Bill Holm

“You must sit down to speak this language,
It is so heavy you can't be polite or chatter in it.
For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of your life is laid out before you"
-quoted in "The Geography of Bliss”
― Bill Holm

“Don't whine about your poverty and brainless labor. You can read, can't you? Get thee to a library and foment rebellion - in both inner and outer worlds.”
― Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth

“We take too much credit for our effect on the world, whining about our misery and guilt, what others have done or not done to us.”
― Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth

“I inherited from my father and still nourish the notion that Republicans are those who have acquired enough money, often by inheritance and blind luck, to entertain the opinion that their fellow citizens should work harder and be more grateful to the moneyed class while they refrain from work themselves and sit in clean rooms with folded soft hands examining their bank statements and brokerage reports.”
― Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth

“How naive and foolish the young are to imagine that they understand the loneliness of great age, the outliving of your contemporaries, anyone to whom your century of memory might make any sense.”
― Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth

“After publishing The Age of Reason as an old man, Paine was beaten and turned out of his house and away from his town by his fellow citizens to punish him for blasphemy. I had, even then, a little glimmer of how dangerous it actually is for an American to behave like an American. We've never believed a word we've said from the Bill of Rights onward. What conceivable right to we have to feel smug about the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie by fanatical foreigners? We don't do badly with fatwas ourselves.”
― Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth

“It's odd to see pictures of your parents before your own birth, before your nagging presence altered their lives forever.”
― Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth

“Icelandic Language

In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.”
― Bill Holm

“We're keeping our ears alert for any sudden thumps in undusted corners.”
― Bill Holm

“... If you wall a country or a civilization, you misshape it, too, as certainly as if you strangled it with bindings. You have built the wall not just outside but inside, and what you have walled up will be grotesque and stunted, whether you look at it from the moon or elsewhere.”
― Bill Holm, Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays

“Children judge each other harshly, but don't make nice distinctions among the grown.”
― Bill Holm

“There are two eyes in the human head--the eye of mystery, and the eye of harsh truth--the hidden and the open--the woods eye and the prairie eye. The prairie eye looks for distance, clarity, and light; the woods eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for usefulness and plainness in art and architecture, the woods eye for the baroque and ornamental. Dark old brownstones on Summit Avenue were created by a woods eye; the square white farmhouse and red barn are prairie eye's work.”
― Bill Holm, Prairie Days