"To possess a telescope without the other essential half--the microscope--seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension." --Leonora Carrington, House of Fear

One of the curious unspoken conventions of contemporary poetry is that it's all about the same length: just enough to fill up a lettersize page...

"Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power." --Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen (1980)

"The key thing to remember with literature is that it's a wholesale business as opposed to the visual arts, which is retail business." --Richard Kostelanetz in Atticus Review

Plot is the.gollup (gameliness) of Story.

'Tolstoy's excuse as a preacher is that he had two disciples who derived the practical consequences of his homilies: Wittgenstein and Gandhi.' --Cioran

"What good exterminating evil distorts if the sun itself should be owned by spiders?" --Attanasaio, Last Legends of Earth

"Dogs, sewed up in lamb skins, whisper repent, or wittily property is use." --Gerald Burns

A poem cannot levitate one dust-mote. --saying of Asmodeus

Burroughs [my rabbit] always snatches her cracker with vast avidity; often as not, not having hands, her first bite drops the rest between the floor-grate, & i have to retrieve it. How like humans & happiness!

Certainty is a feeling-state not a knowledge-state. A feeling-state, moreover, caused by a particular degree of ignorance...

'I don't believe in Rilke's angels; I believe even less in his poor.' --Cioran

Proverbs from A Maltese Anthology, ed A J Arberry:
   One man dies of drunkenness, and another dies for (want of) a drop.
   An agreement between two people is reached in two days; an agreement between three requires two months.
   Praise the sea, and remain on dry land.
   He who is born round will not die square.
   Whoever says what he likes will have to hear what he doesn't like.
   For the sake of a cent he will skin a louse.

From the point of view of the rest of the Earth, those who are killing the most of their fellow humans--are heroes.