“Occasionally, because of the change of air currents, some storms might come and vegetation might emerge, but the desert never quite becomes lush. Instead, the dry, sandy mountainside might be sculpted into a variety of strange forms. And, if there is underground water, an oasis might be formed.”
Yip, Wai-lim. Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. p. 154.
Catalog Record
University of California Press
“Now that black ground and bushes—
saplings, trees,
each twig and limb—are suddenly white with snow,
the earth becomes brighter than the sky,
that intricate shrub
of nerves, veins, arteries—
myself—uncurls
its knotted leaves
to the shining air.”
Reznikoff, Charles, and Milton Hindus. “Winter Sketches.” Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff, 1917-1976. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1997. p. 154.
Catalog Record
Poetry Foundation
“Ever beginners until all is margin, warm and flat
How the near becomes far and the far becomes near we may
try to discover but we shouldn’t take the question too
seriously”
Hejinian, Lyn. Happily. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2000. p. 20.
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Litmus Press
“All in all, this hurried and partial survey would indicate that the United States had in 1940 several times the productive capacity needed to maintain its people at the living standard of 1900, and this could hardly be regarded as a minimum standard of living. The human animal becomes quite tough with a little practice, and can live for some years on much less than the 1900 standard of living if it believes that it must do so for survival or other reasons which it holds dear.”
Urey, Harold C. "Technology: Peace or War." Social Science 21, no. 4 (1946): 276.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
"Words, where you are, as in a trail, not forest but thicket, pine needle modifiers, shingles of a pine cone on which to focus, but syntax, syntax was the half-light. The more the worker expends himself in the work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in fact of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself. Point of transfer. Paper treated chemically
so as to alter perception. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality. Chance of light rain. Tenderness in that wicked man."
Silliman, Ron. The Age of Huts (compleat). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. p. 99.
Catalog Record
University of California Press
“…o matter matter
consciousness is also touch
creation is creation of this place
image of what we are
life felt most sharply where the dead wait
where our fathers do not sleep
do not not-sleep
earth that the book has led us down to
will show the way home at last
a world of obstacles
—‘that crush me’ Kafka wrote—
in beautiful pursuit
procession into sun moon stars
the tree outside the house becomes
the road to heaven
shamans climb it with our children
fathers did too
whose beards tangled in its branches
animals & people in a world we knew
soon to be wrested from us by invasion
of some darker mind…”
Rothenberg, Jerome. “11/75.” Vienna Blood & Other Poems. New York: J. Laughlin, 1980. p. 42.
Catalog Record
New Directions Books
“Basic decisions of our society are made through the expressed will of the people. That is why when we see these liberties threatened, instead of falling apart, our nation becomes unified and our democracies come together as a unified group in spite of our varied backgrounds and many racial strains.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Struggle for Human Rights” Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, September 28, 1948, in Allida Black, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: Vol. 1: The Human Rights Years, 1945-1948, 900-905.
Catalog Record
Columbian College of Arts & Sciences
“The dark ground is flat to the river—bright with dawn;
beyond rise the mountains blue and purple;
the blue of the sky becomes purple, in which a star is shining.
The desert is white with snow, the sage heaped with it;
the mountains to the north are white.”
Reznikoff, Charles, edited by Seamus Cooney. “Autobiography: New York.” The Poems of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. p. 194.
Catalog Record
WorldCat
“What is relatively stable and fixed, because it has no end and no beginning, is the world of which that sensibility becomes conscious, the world in and through which that sensibility would discover and define itself. The end of Song of Myself, the moral object which synchronizes with its poetic object, is to know that the world is there, and in the knowing, to know itself as there; in effect, through such a transaction to create itself and the possibility for readers to create themselves.”
Pearce, Roy Harvey. "Toward an American Epic." The Hudson Review 12, no. 3 (1959): 366. doi:10.2307/3848762.
Catalog Record
The Hudson Review
“The serfs have become free citizens once more. By offering to all the mediators the being that was previously captive in Nature and in Society, the passage of time becomes more comprehensible again. In the world of the Copernican Revolution, in which everything had to be contained between the poles of Nature and Society, history did not really count.”
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. p. 81.
Catalog Record
Harvard University Press
“It is a projection of the Middle Kingdom on to a line transformed into an arrow by the brutal separation between what has no history but emerges nevertheless in history – the things of nature – and what never leaves history – the labours and passions of humans. The asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes an asymmetry between past and future. The past was the confusion of things and men; the future is what will no longer confuse them.”
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. p. 71.
Catalog Record
Harvard University Press
“Pure objectivity and pure consciousness are missing, but they are nevertheless – indeed, all the more – in place. The ‘consciousness of something’ becomes nothing more than a slender footbridge spanning a gradually widening abyss. Phenomenologists had to cave in – and they did.”
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. p. 58.
Catalog Record
Harvard University Press
“The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text; the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news. The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place.
This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient.”
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. p. xxi.
Catalog Record
University of California Press
“The westerly winds begin to blow in may but are not settled till a month afterwards. the west winds always bring rain, tornadoes, and very tempestuous weather. At the first coming in of these winds they blow but faintly; but then the tornadoes rise one in a day, sometimes two. These are thunder-showers which commonly come against the wind, bringing with them a contrary wind to what did blow before. After the tornadoes are over the wind shifts about again and the sky becomes clear, yet then in the valleys and the sides of the mountains there rises thick fog which covers the land.”
Dampier, William, and Nicholas Thomas. New Voyage Round the World. Hereford, United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2020.
Catalog Record
Project Gutenberg Australia