This post is a collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #139 (10.23.24 to 12.22.24). There are 10 quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996, poet)
"By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential." (Open Remarks as U.S. Poet Laureate, 1991)
Elias Canetti (1905-1994, writer)
"You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas - better to write down what refutes and weakens them!" (The Secret Heart of the Clock, 1987)
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, writer)
"I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it." (Conversations with Nadine Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin Marilyn Dallman Seymour)
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013, poet)
"Debate doesn't really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope." (AZQuotes.com)
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006, writer)
"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." (Quoted in Thinking for a Change by Michael Gelb)
Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004, poet)
"Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that alas, does not alter the fact that they exist." (The Captive Mind, 1953)
Alice Munro (1931-2024, writer)
"People are curious... You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish." (AZQuotes.com)
Kenzaburō Ōe (1935-2003, writer)
"Literature must be written from the periphery towards the center, and we can criticize the center. Our credo, our theme, or our imagination is that of the peripheral human being." (Conversation with Kenzaburō Ōe by Harry Kreisler 1999)
Thomas Tranströmer (1931-2015, poet)
"The scientific method I was closest to was the Linnaean: discover, collect, examine." (For the Living and the Dead, 1996)
Derek Wolcott (1930-2017, poet)
"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." (What the Twilight Says: Essays)
