Matsuo Bashō · 224 pages
Rating: (454 votes)
“Sadly, I part from you;
Like a clam torn from its shell,
I go, and autumn too.”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
“Lonely stillness— a single cicada’s cry sinking into stone”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
“A warbler singing— somewhere beyond the willow, before the thicket”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
“The past remains hidden in clouds of memory.”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
“Spring passes
and the birds cry out—tears
in the eyes of fishes”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
Matsuo Bashō
Born place: in Matsuo Kinsaku, Japan
Born date January 1, 1644
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“No. He won't save my brother. He doesn't love me no matter what he believes. He loves that I need him. But I don't. Not really. Because despite what I thought, what I counted on, he has never been there for me. There is no safety with him. I've always been alone. I just didn't know how isolated I was until now.”
― Joelle Charbonneau, quote from Need
“The Tender Place
Your temples , where the hair crowded in ,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
of a twelve-volt battery -- it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces,
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.
Whether your teeth were still whole .
The hand on the calibrated lever
Again feeling nothing
Except feeling nothing pushed to feel
Some squirm of sensation . Terror
Was the cloud of you
Waiting for these lightnings. I saw
An oak limb sheared at a bang.
You your Daddy's leg . How many seizures
Did you suffer this god to grab you
By the roots of the hair? The reports
Escaped back into clouds. What went up
Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper
And the nerve· threw off its skin
Like a burning child
Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you
A rigid bent bit of wire
Across the Boston City grid. The lights
In the Senate House dipped
As your voice dived inwards
Right through the bolt-hole basement.
Came up, years later,
Over-exposed, like an X-ray --
Brain-map still dark-patched
With the scorched-earth scars
Of your retreat . And your words ,
Faces reversed from the light ,
Holding in their entrails.”
― Ted Hughes, quote from Birthday Letters
“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Moby-Dick
“We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.”
― Matthew Desmond, quote from Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“20 And Isaiah says boldly: I was found by those who were not looking for Me; I revealed Myself to those who were not asking for Me.”
― quote from HCSB: Holman Christian Standard Bible
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