"A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be.Â It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living.Â Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves."

-- Mark Strand

#Busy Quotes #Imagine Quotes #Permit Quotes

“In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My 'dream' action for the women's liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing' smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.”

Source : SHULAMITH FIRESTONE (1970). “THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST REVOLUTION”
“Now culture being a social product, I firmly believe that any work of art should have a social function to beautify, to glorify, to dignify man... Since any social system is forced to change to another by concrete economic forces, its art changes also to be recharged, reshaped, and revitalized by the new conditions... The making of a genuine artist or writer is not mysterious. It is not the work of Divine Providence. Social conditions, history, and the people's struggle are the factors behind it.”
“But now all the natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely that the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles' skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells.”

Source : FaceBook post by Mary Gaitskill from Oct 30, 2011
“We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.”
“(Doc) Cramer told me I was hitting too much off the front foot and that I wasn't using the right kind of bat. I had been using a long, skinny stick and Cramer got me a thicker one.”
“Good words do not last long unless they amount to something.”
“You know over 20 years I played for a number of managers and dozens of coaches. I don't know any of them that I didn't learn something from to help make me a better player.”
“The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.”

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