David B. Lentz > Quotes

“New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand.”
― David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace

“After vindictive winter, apple blossoms seem all the more heaven-sent.
Among flashing forsythia and budding rose, dogwood and daffodil,
The allure of magnolia, azalea and wisteria to lovers’ dreams are lent.
Resolve is recompense as seedtime’s blush dispenses with the chill,
How sweet-scented is New England now as winter tempests are through.
My darling girl, the divinest bloom in cherry blossom time just happens to be you.”
― David B. Lentz, Sonnets from New England: Love Songs

“God made women too beautiful and their memories too long.”
― David B. Lentz, Bloomsday: A Tragicomedy

“Hacks are killing our national literary culture. America treats best-sellers like literary lions and literary lions worse than stray dogs.”
― David B. Lentz, Novel Criticism: How to Critique Novels Like a Novelist

“Maybe, life is a kind of waking dream.
Maybe, it's a double-dream with a false awakening.
Maybe, the dream only becomes lucid and truly luminous given the fuller perspective of life after one's own wake.
Maybe, the pictures never stop.
Doesn't the existence of dreams and higher consciousness during the years of blackouts of a lifetime, whether longer or shorter, give us a valid premise to hope that another highly spiritual state may await our passing?”
― David B. Lentz, For the Beauty of the Earth: A Novel

“A perfectly clear photograph is a distortion of reality.”
― David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace

“The Housefly

I’m just a little pesky thing,
Flying to eke out a living.
So round and round and round I hiss,
And fill the air with busy bliss.
Of hand and swatter steering clear,
I venture to light on crumbs and beer.
In salad days I was a Grecian king.
War and famine make me sing.
How much they’d like to whack me flat,
With a newspaper or even a baseball bat.
Splat!”
― David B. Lentz, Bloomsday: A Tragicomedy

“I look forward to the promising upside of the long-term that lingers ahead for me after such abysmal days. Things always just seem to balance out in the long run. In fact, I’m almost there. The zero line is within inches of my trembling outstretched grasp.”
― David B. Lentz, The Day Trader: A Novel

“IRELAND
Spenserian Sonnet
abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee

What is it about the Kelly velvet hillsides and the hoary avocado sea,
The vertical cliffs where the Gulf Stream commences its southern bend,
Slashing like a sculptor gone mad or a rancorous God who’s angry,
Heaving galaxies of lichen shrouded stones for potato farmers to tend,
Where the Famine and the Troubles such haunting aspects lend,
Music and verse ring with such eloquence in their whimsical way,
Let all, who can hear, rejoice as singers’ intonations mend,
Gaelic souls from Sligo and Trinity Green to Cork and Dingle Bay,
Where fiddle, bodhran, tin whistle, and even God, indulge to play,
Ould sod to Beckett, Wilde and Yeats, Heaney and James Joyce,
In this verdant, welcoming land, ‘tis the poet who rules the day.
Where else can one hear a republic croon in so magnificent a voice?
Primal hearts of Celtic chieftains pulse, setting inspiration free,
In genial confines of chic caprice, we’re stirred by synchronicity.”
― David B. Lentz, Sonnets from New England: Love Songs

“God in His infinite wisdom blessed humans with redundant tongues: one to outfit the mouth for speech. And a mother tongue to give it meaning... Though it wags out such inconceivable beauty, attached to the mother tongue lies one much maligned woman.”
― David B. Lentz, Bloomsday: The Bostoniad

“I became the fractured shell of a mustard seed to dwell for an eye-blink amid a starburst galaxy of broken dreams.”
― David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace

“I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let’s pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners.”
― David B. Lentz, AmericA, Inc.: A Novel in Stream of Voice

“The ability to find pixilation amid the pixelation is at the essence of the gift of celestial Grace.”
― David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace

“Our dreams drive us so. One after another. Jasmine sprung bravely from the fertile soil of our suffering. And who can live without dreams? Who loves their brief, sweet passage? Dum vivimus, vivimus. While we live, let us live.”
― David B. Lentz, Bourbon Street: The Dreams of Aeneas in Dixie

“It's intriguing to observe so many of the outrageous prophecies, made with such biting satire years ago in the first edition, come into being through the craft of so many self-entitled egomaniacs running a global 'corpornation' for personal interest and professional profit. I had no idea then, as I now know, that I was writing with so much understatement. Honest outrage and political satire are two of the most important weapons that we have to protect infringement against our personal freedoms through oligarchy and to maintain any semblance of humanity in our democracy as our government aggressively privatizes and over-reaches at the expense of those millions whom it has sworn so dishonestly to serve and has utterly abandoned.”
― David B. Lentz, AmericA, Inc.: A Novel in Stream of Voice

“New York had pushed and bent and bullied, driving me underground to sort out the madness and sculpt my Being with my own hands in self-discovery on its cold pottery wheel and in the white heat of its kiln. The City enabled me to learn who I really was, as a pixelated man and member of Humanity.”
― David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace

“To B-major or B-minor: that is the question. Consider that the major and minor chords are separated by the smallest tonal step which is one half-step carrying in its pitch the gravity of all humanity which needs the major to recognize its relative, inherent tragedy which once given expression seeks the resurrection that only the major can procreate which self-expression gives beauty to the harmony of the major which then confirms the whole truth of the tragic minor saga which overcomes the hidden hand of destiny in the great ellipse of being and the greater cosmic void of nothingness which passage of time has sadly destined to be replayed in the same octave of the ineluctable modality of the audible which ellipse with such a simple twist resonates as infinity which is both meaningless beyond all human capacity for understanding but which holds within it the ubiquitous mystic beauty and truth of the pulsing human heart.”
― David B. Lentz, Bloomsday: The Bostoniad

“Tim Finnegan’s Wake
by Dr. Thom Dedalus

When God reeled in good auld Tim Finnegan,
And looked into his green Irish peepers,
Said He, “Now, what was I thinkin’?
Poor lad, he ain’t one of the keepers.”

To hell Tim descended without any fear,
To the devil, whom not much is lost on,
Said he, “I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here,
Among all your old friends from South Boston.”

Tim’s jokes night and day caused Satan to swear,
As migraines crept behind blood red eyelids,
“An eternity with you is just too much to bear.
You’re going home to your wife and your nine kids.”

So up pops Tim at his wake from his casket.
“It can’t be,” went a howl from his wife.
When he belched the sea from his own breadbasket,
Said she, “Someone, hand me a knife.”

Now Tim’s fishing off George’s Banks
Catching codfish, haddock and hake.
The happiest folk in town to give thanks,
Is John Hancock for Finnegan’s wake.

Finn’s now a legend among life underwriters,
In Beantown and all over the States.
In him beats the heart of a fighter.
Sad to hear how they increased his rates.

Finn’s tale is best told with a dram of Jameson.
You’re entitled to whatever sense you can make.
Just cause you’re dead, it don’t mean you’re gone.
You may take comfort in Finnegan’s wake.”
― David B. Lentz, Bloomsday: The Bostoniad

“My best advice is never to address any woman as Madam unless she holds a high position in government or you happen to find yourself in a brothel speaking to its owner.”
― David B. Lentz, Bloomsday: The Bostoniad

“The Resonance of Honeyed Summer
Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence
abab, cdcd, efef, gg

Synchronous in honeyed summer sings a choir of tremulous birch leaves,
A sweet breeze surges south from the mountains to cool down the farm.
To a white picket fence, among the honeybees, a steadfast garden cleaves,
After blind disregard by a town plow, mended again from winter harm.
A sensual scent of new mown meadow, the clash of croquet mallet to ball,
A ricochet sings a tin din of two wickets and a knock into a winning stake.
By the barn, night owls howl, by day gleeful wee hummingbirds enthrall.
The mirth of dipping children as wakes of droning motorboats lap a lake.
Bluebirds have woven a love nest in a stilted, rough-hewn, wooden house.
By a stonewall wild berries grow swollen from green to a misty blue hue.
As we ride bikes beside a hayfield, we rouse the flight of a russet grouse.
At dawn a doe and fawn cross our lawn leaving hoof prints upon the dew.
In long lemonade days, rocking and sipping on the porch, in our defense,
We're in awe of honeyed summertime and the harmony of its resonance.

+ + +”
― David B. Lentz, Sonnets on the Common Man: New Hampshire Verse

“The poet is a Cyclops in the Kingdom of the Blind whose sole cure for the madness of his vision must be starvation.”
― David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace

“The relentless persistence of Light eventually exhausts darkness.”
― David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace

“How shall we embrace the common man: give us a reason without a doubt?
Is Everyman fated as an island unto himself ‘til his last bright day goes by?”
― David B. Lentz, Sonnets on the Common Man: New Hampshire Verse