Brian Wilkins

“Agesilao had his rivals even in Italy, chief among them Eugenio Pini from Livorno, who could be just as short-tempered. When he fought Rue “The Invincible,” the French master who, hit twice in succession, failed to acknowledge being hit as etiquette dictated, Pini pulled the button from his foil and with his next attack ripped open Rue’s jacket. He then tore off his mask and shouted, “I suppose that one didn’t arrive either?”
― Richard Cohen, By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions

“In “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” Pound had found the inspiration of a moving syntax (as contrasted with the categorical syntax of Joyce, where parts of speech are things). “A true noun, an isolated thing,” we read in the Fenollosa essay, “does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.”
― Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book

“Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?”
― Waldo Ralph Emerson, Essays, First Series

“You hold in your hand an invitation: to remember the transforming power of forgiveness and loving kindness. To remember that no matter where you are and what you face, within your heart peace is possible.”
― Jack Kornfield