jpiccs

“be strange to yourself
in your love, your grief”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope?
You yourself must change it.
What would it feel like to know
your country was changing?
You yourself must change it.
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
What would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?”
― Adrienne Rich

“He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“More or less," that most ambiguous of phrases, pervades many of the conversations that comprise this book, reflecting, perhaps, the ambiguity of attitude toward The Job. Something more than Orwellian acceptance, something less than Luddite sabotage. Often the two impulses are fused in the same person.”
― Studs Terkel, Working