Pēteris Cedriņš

“The apprenticeship to passivity—I know nothing more contrary to our habits. (The modern age begins with two hysterics: Don Quixote and Luther.) If we make time, produce and elaborate it, we do so out of our repugnance to the hegemony of essence and to the contemplative submission it presupposes. Taoism seems to me wisdom’s first and last word: yet I resist it, my instincts reject it, as they refuse to endure anything—the heredity of revolt is too much for us. Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us?”
― Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“PRELIMINARY EXERCISE:

What does a turbine veil? a bird avail what chord?
I heard a bird whir no word, felt
a turbine shadow turning from the floods of time
electric currents the darkness stirrd,
and trees in blaze of light arose
casting shadows of speech, seductive, musical, abroad.
It was a single tree. It was a word of many trees
that filld the vale.
It was a store of the unspoken in the bird
that whirrd the air, that every occasion of the word
overawed.”
― Robert Duncan