“Each was over fifty and poor, probably homeless, wearing clothes that hadn't been washed this year. They were the same type of man you could see in any city in America, in a little park or square just off downtown, halfway to skid row. I think they started making them after the Civil War; fighters who'd lost their wars and lost their fight. Even when their side won, they lost.”
― Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
― Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
“what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate.”
― My Struggle: Book 6
― My Struggle: Book 6
“Writing a poem is like trying to halt a supertanker by holding a dandelion up to it. You can laugh at the frivolity of it. You can ridicule the person for doing such a thing. But—and I’m not saying this makes you one of them—when you laugh at poets, you laugh alongside tyrants. You are standing next to the powerful and the angry and the rich, and you might as well be a bully too, laughing at the weak person cutting snowflakes out of tissue paper. Yes, you are right. But is right everything you want to be?”
― Hitomi
― Hitomi
“You Reading This, Be Ready
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life—
Whatever can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?”
― Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life—
Whatever can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?”
― Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford
“Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between friendship and love.”
― My Struggle: Book 6
― My Struggle: Book 6
Lori’s 2025 Year in Books
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