Peter Cole > Quotes

“Freud could never be certain, he said,
in view of   his wide and early reading,
whether what seemed like a new creation
might not be the work instead
of   hidden channels of memory leading
back to the notions of others absorbed,
coming now anew into form
he’d almost known within him was growing.
He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia.
So we own and owe what we know.”
― Peter Cole

“Evincing the infinite— the size of your palm— what it holds is beyond you, curious, at hand.”
― Peter Cole, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

“Only to read their letters, notes and poems, not to see them smiling … They distilled their wisdom in writing, not in prizes … For a kind of heavenly sense made clear, for an hour, deep inside us: That’s why we read the wise.”
― Peter Cole, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

“Every single person you meet, Philo wrote, it’s said—Everyone— is fighting a very great battle. Except that no one is able to find where he said it, or what he thought the burden might be that brings it on. Still, it’s almost certainly true— and so he added, perhaps, be kind.”
― Peter Cole, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

“Winter with its ink of showers and rain, with its pen of lightning and palm of clouds, wrote a letter of purple and blue across the beds of the garden. No artist in his cunning could measure his work beside it—and so, when earth longed for the sky it embroidered the spread of its furrows with stars.”
― Peter Cole, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

“Poetry chooses choice things, carefully selecting select words, arranging, fabulously, things arranged. To put it differently is hard, if not out of the question.”
― Peter Cole, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations