Jaie Miller

“Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog,
and nobodies dream of escaping poverty:
that one magical day good luck will
suddenly rain on them-will rain
down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t
rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow,
or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the
nobodies summon it, even if their left
hand is tickling, or if they begin the new
day with their right foot, or start the
new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody’s children,
owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no
ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits,
dying trough life, screwed every which
way.

Who are not, but could be. Who don’t
speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t
have religions, but superstitions. Who
don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who
don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are
not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms. Who
do not have names, but numbers. Who
do not appear in the history of the
world, but in the police blotter of the
local paper. The nobodies, who are not
worth the bullet that kills them.”
― Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

“Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with waste ground on either side and a few poorly-stocked little shops. Several ultra-fast staircases give access to the building, running up from the cellars to the roof-gardens. The comfort of this place leaves nothing to be desired and only the greatest luxury is acceptable, but every Friday the residents gather on the ground floor to read from a bible bound in the skin of a blind man. The psalmic words they intone rise up through the pipes, sigh in the stoves and sweep the chimneys coated inside with black grease which leaves dirt on the skin. Water runs constantly in the bathrooms and the showers beat down on the numbered bodies, peppering them with sand. On Sundays the bed linen unrolls by itself and nobody makes love. For this tower block, like an obscure phallus scraping the vulva of the sky, is usually a hive of sexual activity. The most beautiful woman lives there, but no-one has ever known her. It is said, that dressed in furs and feathers, she keeps herself shut away in a first-floor apartment as if in a white safe. Her windows are scissors which cut short both shadow and breath. Her name is AURORA.”
― Michel Leiris, Aurora

“It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.”
― Wislawa Szymborska