"Beauty Ain't Beauty (The Sonnet)

"Will and Wheel (The Sonnet)

"Reason and Heart (The Sonnet)

"Book of Destiny (The Sonnet)

"Broken (The Sonnet)

Tout est possible. Il suffit de le vouloir. Les personnes qui ne r?ussissent pas ce qu'ils veulent faire, c'est parce qu'ils n'y croient pas suffisamment dans leur r?alisation.

So the next time you see a person with a compose face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.

I am sonnets full of stardust within the meter of my skin.

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I'll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction-until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define "literature". The Latin root simply means "letters". Those letters are either delivered-they connect with an audience-or they don't. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that's because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books-and thus what they count as literature-really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

Jeder Tag bedeutet vierundzwanzig neue Stunden. Jeder Tag bedeutet, dass alles m?glich ist. Man lebt den Moment oder man stirbt darin, aber man lebt sein Leben einen Tag nach dem anderen. [...] Und man versucht immer, auf die Sonnenseite zu gelangen. Ins Licht. (Day)

All the Navel therefore and conjunctive part we can suppose in Adam, was his dependency on his Maker, and the connexion he must needs have unto heaven, who was the Sonne of God. For holding no dependence on any preceding efficient but God; in the act of his production there may be conceived some connexion, and Adam to have been in a moment all Navel with his Maker. And although from his carnality and corporal existence, the conjunction seemeth no nearer than of causality and effect; yet in his immortall and diviner part he seemed to hold a nearer coherence, and an umbilicality even with God himself. And so indeed although the propriety of this part be found but in some animals, and many species there are which have no Navell at all; yet is there one link and common connexion, one general ligament, and necessary obligation of all whatever unto God. Whereby although they act themselves at distance, and seem to be at loose; yet doe they hold a continuity with their Maker. Which catenation or conserving union when ever his pleasure shall divide, let goe, or separate, they shall fall from their existence, essence, and operations; in brief, they must retire unto their primitive nothing, and shrink into that Chaos again.

J'ai lu les postmodernistes avec un certain int?r?t avec m?me admiration. Mais quand je les lis, j'ai toujours cet horrible sentiment lancinant que quelque chose d'absolument essentiel est oubli?. Plus on dit qu'une personne est un produit social, ou un confluent de forces ou fragment?e, ou marginalis?e et plus on ouvre tout un nouveau monde d'excuses.

The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.

The real enemy" is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real enemy is not an object apart from life. It is the organization of life by powers detached from it and turned against it. The apparatus, not its personnel, is the real enemy. But it is by and through the apparatchiks and everyone else participating in the system that domination and deception are made manifest. The totality is the organization of all against each and each against all. It includes all the policemen, all the social workers, all the office workers, all the nuns, all the op-ed columnists, all the drug kingpins from Medellin to Upjohn, all the syndicalists and all the situationists.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit

We have the new greatest generation. We don't need as large a military due to the technology we have the equipment we have outfitting our personnel. They really are storm troopers.

I do not think we are ever going to be able to for a long time get the kind of quality of school personnel that we need in our schools especially in the areas of science and math. One of the answers to that problem is to use more educational technology.

Almost all first ladies have had tremendous power on personnel issues whether the public realized it or not whether it was Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan or whoever.

I used to write sonnets and various things and moved from there into writing prose which incidentally is a lot more interesting than poetry including the rhythms of prose.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Nobody could tell us or really had a very good idea if there were a massive release of radiation what kind of medical treatment people were going to need and this or that or indeed whether there would be medical personnel around.

When I gave birth to my fourth child I suffered from post partum hemorrhaging. I almost lost my life. I was lucky to be under the care of trained health care personnel. I started wondering then what was happening to women in rural villages.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day as the poet's health sight his anticipations moods fears thoughts cannot be the same.