AJ > AJ's Quotes

“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”
― Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.”
― Kofi Anan

“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul”
― Victor Hugo , Les Misérables

“Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Them when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team.”
― Karen Witemeyer

“Who made you Queen of Literacy? Go sit in your car!”
― Jackson Pearce

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“One reason that people have artist’s block is that they do not respect the law of dormancy in nature. Trees don’t produce fruit all year long, constantly. They have a point where they go dormant. And when you are in a dormant period creatively, if you can arrange your life to do the technical tasks that don’t take creativity, you are essentially preparing for the spring when it will all blossom again.”
― Marshall Vandruff

“Tell me every terrible thing you ever did, and let me love you anyway.”
― Sade Andria Zabala, Coffee and Cigarettes

“III.

I take my love to Manita. Swift-boned, green-
eyed, dressed in her dark skin and hair, I take my Love in
on fire. Manita moans.
Manita's hands

flow
delicate as insects, agile
as fish, cool as the shifting water, the night-
quiet lake. I take my Love to her hand on
fire. She takes my love.”
― Olga Broumas, Beginning with O

“Don't cure me, Mother, I couldn't bear
the bath
of your bitter spittle.
No salve
no ointment in a doctor's tube, no brew in a witch's kettle, no lover's mouth, no friend
or god could heal me
if your heart
turned in anathema, grew stone
against me.
Defenseless
and naked as the day
I slid from you
twin voices keening and the cord
pulsing our common protests, I'm coming back
back to you
woman, flesh
of your woman's flesh, your fairest, most
faithful mirror,
my love
transversing me like a filament
wired to the noonday sun.

Receive
me, Mother.”
― Olga Broumas, Beginning with O

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
― Anne Carson (Translator), Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides