Michael Strode

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.”
― Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays

“For when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs all of the others ... the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have the less you worry.

When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have three francs left, you are quite indifferent ... you are bored but you are not afraid. You think vaguely "I shall be starving in a day or two- shocking, isn't it?" And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.”
― George Orwell

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
― Nikki Giovanni