Quote of the Week - XIII

 Some excerpts from the wonderful Gilgamesh - The Life of a Poem, by Michael Schmidt:

Page 32, Tablet 1

He who saw everything, of him learn, o my land, learn

of him who sought to know what lands are for, & people, to turn

to fruitfulness after the wastings and the idlenesses, the ways

to use what is called strength after its misuse, he who had tidings

of times when deltas were of use as deltas and not floodings of excrement...

~ Charles Olson, 'Bigmans II'

Page 46, Tablet 1

"His and Gilgamesh's relationship, whatever its intended nature, is emblematic of the ways in which narrative fact requires the complementarity of invention and its illuminating irony, to find the sense in it. Fiction throws a raking light over fact; it also projects the shadows that make for three-dimensionality in an otherwise flattened chronicle."

Quote of the Week - XI

 "Don't fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail."

~ Bruce Lee

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Quote of the Week - X

The heavens and all below them,
Earth and her creatures,
All change,
And we, part of creation,
Also must suffer change.

~ Ovid

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Quote of the Week - IX

"If water is not piled up deep enough, it won't have the strength to bear up a big boat. Pour a cup of water into a hollow in the floor, and bits of trash will sail on it like boats. But set the cup there, and it will stick fast, for the water is too shallow and the boat too large. If wind is not piled up deep enough, it won't have the strength to bear up great wings. Therefore when the Peng rises ninety thousand li, he must have the wind under him like that. Only then can he mount on the back of the wind, shoulder the blue sky, and nothing can hinder or block him. Only then can he set his eyes to the south." 

~ The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, translated by Burton Watson

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Quote of the Week - VIII

आचख्युः कवयः केचित्संप्रत्याचक्षते परे 
आख्यास्यन्ति तथैवान्ये इतिहासमिमं भुवि 

Some poets told this epic before. 
Others are telling it now. 
Different narrators will tell it in the future.

~ Mahabharata, by Ved Vyasa, Truschke's translation. 

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Quote of the Week - VII

O mortal men,
Arise! And, casting off your earthly cares,
Learn ye the potency of heaven-born mind,
Its thought and life far from the herd withdrawn!

~ Edmund Halley, in the preface to Newton's Principia. 

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Quote of the Week - VI

Volcanoes be in Sicily

And South America,

I judge from my geography.

Volcanoes nearer here,

A lava step, at any time,        

Am I inclined to climb,

A crater I may contemplate,

Vesuvius at home.

- Emily Dickinson

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Quote of the Week - V

I segreti de' regi al folle volgo
ben commessi non sono

"It behoves not kings to confide their secrets to the foolish populace"

~ Torrismondo (according to Tasso)

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Quote of the Week - IV

I see a land devoid of the face of my beloved.
I see a meadow empty of the stature of that upright cypress.
That place where that beloved used to wander in the garden with friends
Is now the dwelling of the wolf and fox, the domain of wild asses and vultures.

- Muizzi

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Quote of the Week - III

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst, into nimble
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.


Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

- Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney 

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Quote of the Week - II

For lo! the Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d,
The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round.
On shining Altars of Japan they raise
The silver Lamp; the fiery Spirits blaze.
From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide,
And China’s Earth receives the smoaking Tyde.

~ Alexander Pope on coffee, from The Rape of the Lock

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Quote of the Week - I

   The breath within my lungs was so exhausted

from climbing, I could not go on; in fact,

as soon as I had reached that stone, I sat.

   "Now you must cast aside your laziness,"

my master said, "for he who rests on down

or under covers cannot come to fame;

   and he who spends his life without renown

leaves such a vestige of himself on earth

as smoke bequeaths to air or foam to water.

   Therefore, get up; defeat your breathlessness

with spirit that can win all battles if

the body's heaviness does not deter it.

   A longer ladder still is to be climbed;

it's not enough to have left them behind;

if you have understood, now profit from it."

   Then I arose and showed myself far better

equipped with breath than I had been before:

"Go on, for I am strong and confident

The Divine Comedy: Inferno by Dante Alighieri (Mandelbaum translation)