Jonathan Le Tocq

“As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“Napoleon said, “The main use of religion is to keep the common people from murdering the rich.”
― Garrison Keillor, The Lake Wobegon Virus

“One problem is that here in the Twin Cities it’s hard to find that many freaks—at least, any who care to come on TV and talk about it,” said Fielding. “We don’t have a reliable supply of cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, eunuchs, or geeks. We have plenty of alcoholics, but how interesting are they? They don’t remember anything. This is Minnesota, we’re a journalistically challenged state. I mean, when was the last time a band of Lutherans holed up in a compound with automatic weapons? We don’t have that here.”
― Garrison Keillor, The Book of Guys: Stories

“First of all, most poems aren’t memorable; in fact, they make no impression at all. Sorry, but it’s true. There are brave blurbs on the back cover (“writes with a lyrical luminosity that reconceptualizes experience with cognitive beauty”) but you open up the goods and they’re like condoms on the beach, evidence that somebody was here once and had an experience but not of great interest to the passerby.”
― Garrison Keillor, Good Poems