07.08.02 - 11:31 a.m.

quotes...

(hahahaha. fooled you! i bet you thought this was gonna be a mailbox clean-up post. nope! though, it's inspired by the mailbox clean-ups. basically, i have several different blank journal books in which i've started a collection of quotes of which i'm fond. and, this is a better way to save them.

....so, today's entries are just the quotes on post-it notes at work, since i don't have access to any of those books. hee. and, of course the ones around this space are obviously some of my favorite. btw, the title of the page is the english translation of the one quote from dante. )

"He was not only eager to talk about himself, but was also reluctant to have the subject stray for long."

-- Henry David Thoreau writing about Whitman

"All the silkworm family do their eating as caterpillars - Ios, Lunas - and as adults have no mouths. Mute, romantic extravagence, a starving creature racing with death to scour the night for a mate."

-- Barbara Kingsolver, from Prodigal Summer.

(btw, if you're looking for a good read and haven't read Kingsolver, start with the bean trees, then pick up the next one (animal dreams), then go for poisonwood bible. i wouldn't recommend prodigal summer unless you are a. a really big fan; b. have nothing else good to read. her language is lovely, but the story is pretty much... stereotypical crap. or, rather, uhm... just too neat for real life. her heroines are close to perfect as possible, and there are few enough mixed feelings.)

"...a leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of a drunkard's eye."

-- William Butler Yeats, from the Seven Sages

so those, and poem about morning, are the quotes hanging around my office right now. more, in a later installment.