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The Latin Deli by Judith Ortiz Cofer
“I know who I am, and who I may be if I choose.”
-Don Quixote
Body of Render by Felicia Zamora
“Why are we here if not for each other?”
-Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
“We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.”
-Wisława Szymroska, view with a grain of sand
“Say it again—we are
spared nothing.”
-Yusef Komunyakaa, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head
Ohio Violence by Alison Stine
“I began in Ohio.
I still dream of home.”
-James Wright
If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson
“If you come as softly
as the wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.”
The Romances by Lo Kwa Mei-en
“The drones never have any other children than daughters.”
-from Literary Digest,
Funk and Wagnalls (1902)
Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple by Malcolm Friend
“for our blood, mixed
soon with their passion in sport,
in difference, in anger,
will create new soils, new souls, new
ancestors”
-Kamau Brathwaite
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”
-Thomas Parke D’Invillers
House of Lords and Commons by Ishion Hutchinson
“Praise the barbarians invading your sleep
Their exploding horses hurting the snow”
The Odyssey by Simon Armitage
“Remind us, Muse, of that man of many means,
sent spinning the length and breadth of the map
after brining the towers of Troy to their knees;
of the lessons he learned in the cities of great minds,
and the heartbreak he suffered, roaming the seas
to land his shipmates and salvage his life.
But for all the torture and grief he sustained
his comrades were lost; heedless fools,
they gorged on the flesh of the Cattle of the Sun.
In turn, the God of the Sun made death their domain.
Muse, daughter of Memory and Zeus,
Where to start this story is yours to choose.”
A Sand Book by Ariana Reines
“NO MORE SAND ART, no sand book, no masters.”
-Paul Celan
Letters to a Stranger by Thomas James
“Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.”
-James Baldwin, “Giovanni’s Room”
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
“Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
In this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage…”
-John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
“The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grace is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrappèd up;
The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk and dry’d
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing, awakening,
Spring like redeemèd captives, when their bonds and bars are burst,
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field,
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air;
Let the enchainèd soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge.
They look behind at every step, and believe it is a dream,
Singing: “The Sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning,
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease.”
-from “America: A Prophecy” by William Blake
“ O stars,
isn’t it from you that the lover’s desire for the face
of his beloved arises? Doesn’t his secret insight
into her pure features come from the pure constellations?”
-from “The Third Elegy” by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living.
The night is cold and delicate and full of angels
Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up,
The chime goes unheard.
We are together at last, though far apart.”
-from “The Ecclesiast” by John Ashbery
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
“We have this history of impossible solutions for insoluble problems.”
-Will Eisner, in conversation
“Wonderful escape!”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield”
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
“The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world.”
-Czeslaw Milosz
The Separate Notebooks
Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás
“Magic exists in most societies in one way or another, and one of the forms it exists in a lot of places is, if you know a thing’s true name, you have power over the thing, or the person. And of course it’s irresistible because I’m a writer. I use words, and knowing the names of things is—I do magic, I do make up things that didn’t exist before by naming them.”
-Ursula K. Le Guin, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin
(dir. Arwen Curry, 2018)
The Handbook of Heartbreak edited by Robert Pinsky
“Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!”
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner
“someone who goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality”
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another which states that this has already happened.”
Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
“Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.”
The Little Tragedies by Alexander Pushkin
“So far I’ve been reading nothing but Pushkin and am drunk with rapture, every day I discover something new.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky in a letter to his wife, 16 (28) July 1874
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
“Oh, monsters are scared…
That’s why their monsters.”
-Neil Gaiman
Look by Solmaz Sharif
“look— (*) In mine warfare, a period during which a mine circuit is respective of an influence.”
-Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms
United States Department of Defense
Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss
“The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal. Consequently the expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal nature of the process makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there in actual face, no matter whether we know it here or not”
-Kafka
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
“The cattle are lowing,
The Baby awakes.
But the little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes.”
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (blacked-out)
“Jesus crying”
100 Heartbeats by Jeff Corwin
“Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans.”
-President Richard Nixon, statement upon signing the Endangered Species Act of 1973
A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
“… revelatory truth has a great allure: It seems to answer our craving for oder and meaning. It gives our chaotic histories a satisfying “shapeliness.”
-Emily Fox Gordon, Mockingbird Years
“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
-Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”
On Writing by Stephen King
“Honesty’s the best policy.”
-Miguel de Cervantes
“Liars prosper.”
-Anonymous
Unfinished: Stories finished by Lily Hoang
“At the beginning of a story, attack a subject, no matter where, and open with some very beautiful phrases which will arouse the desire to complete it.”
-Baudelaire
On Hell by Johanna Hedva
“Travel is a meat thing.”
-William Gibson
Fire Summer by Thuy Da Lam
“We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.”
-T.S. Eliot
xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths edited by Kate Bernheimer
“What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine”
-from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
In Which _______ And Others Discover The End by Rachel Jendrzejewski and Supergroup
“Until the late twentieth century, every generation throughout history lived with the tacit certainty that there would be generations to follow. Each assumed, without questioning, that its children and children’s children would walk the same Earth, under the same sky. Hardships, failures, and personal death were encompassed in that vaster assurance of continuity. That certainty is now lost to us, whatever our politics. That loss, unmeasured and immeasurable, is the pivotal psychological reality of our time.”
-Joanna Macy, Working Through Environmental Despair
“…where is it that we can gather and kind of be alone together? And, you know, there’s so much, as we all know, ‘us/them.’ And what are the circumstances for ‘we,’ that I can enjoy the pleasure of something I’m seeing here, know that I’m also sharing that with a person next to me? And there’s an interesting kind of intimacy with this total stranger that the situation makes possible.”
-Ann Hamilton, Interview with Krista Tippett
On Being: Making, and the Spaces We Share
Eugene Onegin and Other Poems by Alexander Pushkin
“Pétri de vanité, il avait encore plus de cette espèce d’orgueil qui fait avouer avec la même indifférences les bonnes comme les mauvaises actions, suite d’un sentiment de supériorité peut-être imaginaire”
(Tiré d’une letter particulière)
Jack Kerouac / Allen Ginsberg / The Letters edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford
“I’ve all these two days spent filing old letters, taking them out of old envelopes, clipping the pages together, putting them away… hundreds of old letters from Allen, Burroughs, Cassady, enuf to make you cry the enthusiasms of younger men… how bleak we become. And fame kills all. Someday ‘The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac’ will make America cry.”
-Jack Kerouac, in a letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, May 25, 1961
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
“Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.”
-Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 188
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
“It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings, going on in the peaceful woods, & smiling fields.”
-Darwin, 1839 journal entry
“Men ask the way to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.”
-Han-shan
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