I have with me all that I do not know.  I have lost none of it.

W. S. Merwin

Was Is

Was = is

What was

is.

What wasn't

never was

(and isn't).

The friend that isn't

wasn't.

Everything, everything

happens at the same time

and that time is now.

Always.

Rather than hold his hands properly

arched off the keys, like cats

with their backs up,

Monk, playing block chords,

hit the keys with his fingertips well

above his wrists,

shoulders up, wrists down

Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane 

at Carnegie Hall,1957

You can be a genius and be sane.

My weaknesses are less remarkable than 

all the things I have at one time or another 

imagined were my strengths.

The mistakes I made from weakness 

do not embarrass me nearly so much as those 

I made insisting on my strength.

Vectors: 56 Aphorisms and Ten-second Essays

James Richardson 

 Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value. 

--Plato

“I’m mercurial, sometimes I want greatness, sometimes just its shadow.”

Roberto Bolaño

The More Loving One

W. H. Auden, 1907 - 1973

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

— William S. Burroughs, Letters to Allen Ginsberg

"The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication."

— Terry Pratchett - Guards! Guards! 

“Sometimes you need to do more than burn the bridge to stop yourself from crossing it again.”