Quotations

"We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies."

— Voltaire, French Enlightenment writer, born 1694

"As high as you are seated, you are seated on your ass."

— Voltaire, French Enlightenment writer, born 1694

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

— Kurt Vonnegut, American writer, died April 11, 2007

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

— Kurt Vonnegut, American writer, born November 11, 1922

"What should young people do with their lives today? The most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

— Kurt Vonnegut, American writer, born November 11, 1922

"Do you realize that all great literature — "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" — are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being?"

— Kurt Vonnegut, American writer, born November 11, 1922

"A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo."

— Kurt Vonnegut, American writer, born November 11, 1922

"The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice."

— Wilhelm Richard Wagner, German composer, died February 13, 1883

"Joy is not in things; it is in us."

— Richard Wagner, German composer, born May 22, 1813

"My basic philosophy can be summed up by an expression we use in Norwegian: hurry slowly. Get there, but be patient."

— Grete Waitz, Norwegian runner, born October 1, 1953

"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."

— Derek Walcott, Saint Lucian poet, born 1930

"Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well."

— Anne Waldman, American poet, born 1945

"If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst."

— Anne Waldman, American poet, born 1945

"Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination."

— Anne Waldman, American poet, born 1945