Langston > Langston's Quotes

“I believe the stars are the headlights of angels driving from heaven to save us
to save us...Won't you look at the sky?
They're driving from heaven into our eyes. And though final words are so hard to devise, I promise that I'll always remember your pretty eyes.”
― David Berman

“You can't change the feeling
but you can change your feelings about the feeling in a second or two”
― david berman

“There were no new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understanding against.”
― David Berman, Actual Air

“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their
own.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin

“The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.”
― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Baby one night somebody
Going to strike a match on a tombstone
And read your name.”
― Frank Stanford, Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives

“The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes”
― John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

“I think, therefore I am, said a man whose mother quickly
hit him on the head, saying, I hit my son on the head,
therefore I am.
No no, you've got it all wrong, cried the man.
So she hit him on the head again and cried, therefore I am.
You're not, not that way; you're supposed to think, not hit,
cried the man.

. . . I think, therefore I am, said the man.
I hit, therefore we both are, the hitter and the one who gets
hit, said the man's mother.
But at this point the man had ceased to be; unconscious he
could not think. But his mother could. So she thought, I am,
and so is my unconscious son, even if he doesn't know it . . .”
― Russell Edson

“Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.
Morning arrives and that's it.
Sunlight darkens the earth.”
― Charles Wright

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“What hath night to do with sleep?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost