Rodney Phillips > Rodney's Quotes

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“You make love like a wounded panther. You are like a paintshop on fire.”
― David Hare, A Map of the World

“Our finger prints don't fade from the lives we touch.”
― judy blume

“Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.”
― Wallace Stevens

“In fact, the Justice Department argued, the president could ban the entire press corps from the White House: “No journalist has a First Amendment right to enter the White House.” As a reporter who has covered the White House on and off for two decades, I thought this was a terrifying argument, and it was especially disturbing that it was being made by the US Department of Justice on behalf of the president.”
― Jonathan Karl, Front Row at the Trump Show

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
― Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature

“If on a friend’s bookshelf
You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,

You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain.”
― Alexander Theroux

“As Rotundo, Donald Yacovone, and other historians have argued, the men involved in such same-sex relationships should not retrospectively be classified as homosexual, since no concept of the homosexual existed in their culture and they did not organize their emotional lives as homosexuals; many of them were also on intimate terms with women and went on to marry. Nonetheless, the same historians persist in calling such men heterosexual, as if that concept did exist in the early nineteenth century.”
― George Chauncey

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I don’t think dreams mean anything; they just are. There’s no reason to translate them into logic.”
― Aase Berg

“The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears - and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition.”
― Mina Loy

“I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the
resolution of doubts but in their proliferation”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.”
― C.D. Wright

“There is no half-measure--NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition”
― Mina Loy

“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:



We got dressed and showed the house

You live well the visitor said

The slum must be inside you.



If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.”
― C.D. Wright

“Blond trollops who don go-go boots flop pompoms nonstop to do promos for floorshows. Wow! Hot blonds who doff cotton frocks show off soft bosoms. Hot to trot, two blonds who smooch now romp on cold wood floors for crowds of morons, most of whom hoot or howl: whoop, whoop”
― Christian Bök, Eunoia

“Thinking within strict limits is stifling”
― Christian Bok, Eunoia