Lotus withered, no more umbrellas to the rain.
A single branch, chrysanthemum stands against the frost.
The good sights of the year: remember those,
and now too: citrons yellow, tangerines still green.
translated by J.P. Seaton
Month: April 2018
from Douglas Moore’s Art of Quotation
“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.” Zadie Smith, writer
on Isak Dinesen from Written Lives by Javier Marias
When she finally made her appearance at the numerous parties to which she was invited and at the public readings where she told stories entirely without the aid of notes, they discovered that she was a frail, eccentric old lady, deeply lined and with matchstick-thin arms, all dressed in black, with a turban on her head, diamonds in her ears and large amounts of kohl around her eyes. Despite this, the legend continued, albeit along more concrete lines: according to the Americans, she lived on a diet of oysters and champagne, which was not quite true, for she consumed prawns, asparagus, grapes, and tea. When Isak Dinesen expressed a desire to meet Marilyn Monroe, the novelist Carson McCullers managed to arrange this, and, at a famous lunch, the three women shared a table with Arthur Miller, the husband par excellence, who, surprised by the Baroness’s eating habits, asked which doctor had prescribed this diet of oysters and champagne. They say that America has never seen the like of the scornful look she gave him: “Doctor?” she said. “The doctors are horrified, but I love champagne and I love oysters and they do me good.” Miller went on to make some comment about protein, and it seems that the second scornful look she gave him will also never be seen again on American soil. “I am an old woman and I eat what agrees with me.” The Baroness got on much better with Marilyn Monroe.
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
The Old Fisherman by Liu Tsung-yuan
The old fisherman spends his night beneath the western cliffs.
At dawn, he boils Hsiang’s waters, burns bamboo of Ch’u.
When the mist’s burned off, and the sun’s come out, he’s gone.
The slap of oars, the mountain waters green.
Turn and look, at heaven’s edge, he’s moving with the flow.
Above the clıffs, the aimless clouds go too.
translated by J.P. Seaton
a bouquet of flowers
the flowers
she said
breathe life
in this room this house
a gift
from afar
yet as near
as a bouquet
of flowers
this heart
“Nothing is more human than a book.”
from Douglas Moore’s Art of Quotation
“Nothing is more human than a book.”
—Marilynne Robinson, writer
through your veins
what flows through your veins
flows through your veins
and there’s no way
to flush it out
“All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them.”
from Douglas Moore’s Art of Quotation
“All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them.”
James Comey, author, book quote from A Higher Loyalty
on Djuna Barnes from Written Lives by Javier Marias
Djuna Barnes’s life lasted ninety years and for far too many of them she either did not want or could not have any lovers and so she had no alternative but to remain silent. Her apartment in New York was her inaccessible refuge. There she received letters and the cheques with which her friend, the multimillionairess Peggy Guggenheim, kept her provided for years, as well as the occasional call from publishers wanting to reprint her few books, and with whom she invariably grew indignant. (She got indignant with Henry Miller too, whom she thought was a swine.) Sometimes she would work three or four eight-hour days just to produce two or three lines of verse, and the slightest noise would ruin her concentration for the rest of the day and plunge her into despair. According to one of her biographers, she spent more than fifteen thousand days, that is, more than forty years, in her apartment in Patchin Place. And we know that most of them. days and years, passed in total silence without her exchanging a single word with anyone. Just the noise of the typewriter and those lines still unread. In 1931, long before those forty years began, she had written: “I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further, and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not vanished.”
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
“Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
from Douglas Moore’s Art of Quotation
Leonard Durso 