Quotations

"You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing face is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for them to see."

— Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, born 1863

"It is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost."

— Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, born 1863

"And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being."

— Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, born 1863

"By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."

— Duke Ellington, American bandleader, born 1899

"Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one."

— Duke Ellington, American bandleader, born 1899

"I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right."

— Duke Ellington, American bandleader, born 1899

"There is another world and it is in this one."

— Paul Eluard, French poet, born 1895

"The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, born 1803

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, born 1857

"Poetry is a place to go back to when there is no way forward."

— Eve Ensler, American playwright, born 1953

"I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edge-wise, grew discouraged, and traveled on."

— Louise Erdrich, American poet, born 1954

"I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms."

— Louise Erdrich, American poet, born 1954

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

— Louise Erdrich, American poet, born 1954

"What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history."

— Louise Erdrich, American poet, born 1954