“I have never forgotten the jeering and sight of that body in the eerie light of the bonfire. It gave me a horror of mob action which has remained with me to this day.”
Warren, Earl. The Memoirs of Earl Warren. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977. p. 13.
Catalog Record
Internet Archive
“the pebble in your mouth its blue flame
the feather its blood
your hand falling releases the light
that your hand rising encloses
the shadow of pain in your eyes”
Antin, David, and Charles Bernstein. “the passengers.” A Conversation with David Antin. New York City, NY: Granary Books, 2002. p. 30.
Catalog Record
University of Pennsylvania
“The days are shorter,
but the light seems to stretch out,
to hark
from a long way off.
Horizons
snap into focus,
while shadows
are distended, smudged.
It’s happening again;
we take
discrepancies
for openings.
The sign
that the guy behind me
in the ‘border protection’ line
is demented
in his impatience,
the way he asks
again and again
what we’re waiting for”
Armantrout, Rae. "BORDER PERFECTION." Conjunctions, no. 54 (2010): 157. Accessed May 27, 2021.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“If any release of tension
is pleasant,
shouldn’t this also
be true of death?
*
The sky sifts downward.
The remaining light
is pendulous.
Clarity is what
the leaves
are spittled with.”
Armantrout, Rae. “Help.” Bomb 154, Winter 2021: Wesleyan Univ Press, 2012.
Boston Review
“This eucalyptus,
with its elliptical leaves
dangling, light and dry
as an abandoned chrysalis,
with its modest bunches
of pale pink flowers
and languid pose,
is my unattainable ideal.”
Armantrout, Rae. "Nonesuch." Boston Review. April 04, 2017. Accessed June 30, 2021.
Boston Review
“That’s how Van Gogh’s church looked. Impossible but real, a glyph for a mortal moment in the constant flux of eternity, a small word ‘human’ against terrifying oblivion.
So standing there, in the early winter light, all the colors of the landscape washed out, the sky completely unremarkably gray, I thought, better not go inside.”
Ali, Kazim. "Ersatz Everything: The Value of Meaning." The American Poetry Review 37, no. 4 (2008): 55. Accessed June 3, 2021.
Catalog Record
The American Poetry Review
“Some nights he dreamed that he was in the desert again, alone, surrounded by the mountains, and in the distance a single tiny glint of light flickering on, off, on, off, like a message.
He opened the tea box.”
Hosseini, Khaled. And the Mountains Echoed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. p. 49.
Catalog Record
Bloomsbury
“Light is construed in the way of things out of
what and shadow out of what
Light darts shadows back deeply
But light and shadow are not things, they are
furtively ways of things (things slightly)”
Hejinian, Lyn. Slowly. Willitis and Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 2002. p. 39.
Catalog Record
“Suddenly it encounters a wind, an onion, a reason
They yield to classification but don’t explain how they got here
Nor why this ‘here’ is more than an island of isolated rationality
or music, a little pool created by light generated by elec-
tricity whose source we can only locate ‘somehow,’
‘somewhere’”
Hejinian, Lyn. Happily. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2000. p. 12.
Catalog Record
Litmus Press
“Even yet the end of the road is not reached. Notice that it is not sufficient to say no body, no light, and no body, no time. There must always be bodies—two at the very least. So the next, and for the logician and philosopher, by far the most imporant step is this: No bodies, no reality; or, saying the same thing in another way, reality itself is an attribute of material bodies.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. p. 70.
Catalog Record
Google Books
“All have shape of some sort; all have resistance to some extent; all, seemingly, affect light rays in one way and another; all have weight, and so on. In other words, a genuine chaos would seem to imply a genuine incorporealness; and a genuine incorporealness would be a geninuine nothingness.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. p. 45.
Catalog Record
Google Books
“Everything went as planned today. No hiccups. I can't tell if I'm driving deeper in to the storm or out of it. It's hard to tell if the ambient light is less or more than it was yesterday. The human brain works hard to abstract that out.”
Weir, Andy. The Martian. New York: Crown Publishers, 2014. p. 356.
Catalog Record
Random House
“That biologically produced light is important in the economy and development of marine deep-sea life is indicated by the fact that eyes are present in deep-sea forms, whereas in the fresh-water fauna of caves where light is absent and where there are no light producers the fishes are blind.”
Sverdrup, H. U., Martin W. Johnson, and Richard Howell Fleming. The Oceans: Their Physics, Chemistry, and General Biology. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1942. p. 835.
Catalog Record
University of California Press E-Books
“Scattered throughout the glowing water are the larger, brighter points of flashing light emitted by jellyfish, copepods, euphausiids, annelids, or other larger forms.”
Sverdrup, H. U., Martin W. Johnson, and Richard Howell Fleming. The Oceans: Their Physics, Chemistry, and General Biology. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1942. p. 834.
Catalog Record
University of California Press E-Books
“The Chinese character forms are entirely a function of the way a brush tip turns when it lifts off the page. Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw.
Light planes like kites, wobbling in the winds. In the long days of the arctic spring, people fly any hour of the day or night.”
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. p. 66.
Catalog Record
BeWild ReWild
“Their trunks fill the sky and reflect a warm golden light. The whole canopy has that sinewy look of ancient trees. Their needles are distinctive tiny patterns against the sky—the Red Fir most strict and fine.”
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. p. 136.
Catalog Record
BeWild ReWild
“Tiny yellow butterflies. A man sits on his front steps, cleaning little white circles from a three-hole punch. Sheets flap in the light breeze. Gulls swirl, over and above the valley. From a backyard one dog barks, then others, until the whole hill is yapping and baying, then it dies back.”
Silliman, Ron. "From "OZ"." Conjunctions, no. 9 (1986): 35. Accessed May 25, 2021.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“Small ceramic animals decorate condo window. Jogging in place, waiting for the light to change. Where that hill slopes too steep to put houses. Gangs of roofers visible on every street. Inhaling, struggling to find air through the muck in my sinuses.”
Silliman, Ron. "From "OZ"." Conjunctions, no. 9 (1986): 33. Accessed May 25, 2021.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“The flesh at the base of the shell-shaped ear pushes it out, away from the head. Lashes so fine and light, almost impossible to see. Dim sum. Cheese platter.”
Silliman, Ron. "From "OZ"." Conjunctions, no. 9 (1986): 32. Accessed May 25, 2021.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“The particulars vary from one religion to the next but the ingredients are stable: paradise is that which existed before the beginning of time, before life and death, before light and darkness. Here animals and man lived in a state of easy companionship, speaking the same language, untroubled by thirst, hunger, pain, weariness, loneliness, struggle, or appetite.”
Myerhoff, Barbara G. From The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. In Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse toward an Ethnopoetics, edited by Jerome and Diane Rothenberg, 230. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1983.
Catalog Record
University of California Press
“These correspondences offer the scholar an entirely new terrain, and one which may still have rich yields to offer. If fish can make an aesthetic distinction between smells in terms of light and dark, and bees classify the strength of light in terms of weight—darkness is heavy, to them, and bright light light—just so should the work of the painter, the poet, and the composer and the myths and symbols of primitive Man seem to us: if not as a superior form of knowledge, at any rate as the most fundamental form of knowledge, and the only one that we all have in common; knowledge in the scientific sense is merely the sharpened edge of this other knowledge.”
In Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse toward an Ethnopoetics, edited by Jerome and Diane Rothenberg, 58. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1983.
Catalog Record
University of California Press
“Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and chance brought them here, now.”
Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. p. 4.
Catalog Record
W.W. Norton