Louis

“What the poet does is as ordinary and mysterious as digesting. I question. I break life down. I impose chaos on order. For instance, we think we know how food is ingested, digested, divided into energy and excrement. The neat theory, however, is one thing; control of the process is another; consciousness of the process yet another. Are we aware of protein in the stomach being acted on by pepsin, the appropriate enzyme? Digestion, thinking and breathing are all functions we perform without knowing how we perform them. The body is a dark continent. The mind is another. So I can say very little about what I do. I accept nothing as read. I attack the pretence that we know how things work, whether they happen to be the action of saliva or sexual love from adolescence to old age.”
― Craig Raine

“It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.”
― Quentin Crisp

“The elementary rules of logic: that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered.”
― Robin Tyler