Ted Cornwell

“I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“I have a foreboding of America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; with our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Not as we are but as we must appear,
contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
desire life, but as they would have us live,
set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
each distant sphere of harmony forever
poised, unanswerable. It is without
consequence when we vaunt and suffer,
or if it is not, all echoes are the same
in such eternity. Then tell me, love,
how that should comfort us-or anyone
dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place
crying to the end ”I have not finished.”

From 'Funeral Music”
― Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems