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QUOTES NEW!

Browse these quotes and familiarize yourself with our publications . . .


May 5, 2019

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Brent Martin

Rick Shu, 2015. WC CC
To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone “out there” is to blame for our pain — one has to abandon these ways of thinking. Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together. It’s all suffering, it’s all despair, and the sooner I can accept this the more beautiful and sad it all becomes. I know I have to let go; I can’t keep going on at this age with such feelings of rage and emptiness. I love the world and the temporality of it all. And despite my long visit to the dark side, I see the light. I can emerge and find a new path. The world has always been this way.

— Brent Martin, "Pushing Through," Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

May 4, 2019

from A Machine for Remembering, by Justen Ahren


Life cracks us open, Sara,
removing what we've ripened inside,
using us for its purpose.
If I'm to be used,
and for this have lost everything,
I pray to be joyous in my use.


— Justen Ahren, "24 September, from a Photo," A Machine for Remembering

May 3, 2019

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Alistair Herbert

US Forest Service, 2009 WC PD
When you sign up to plant trees because you think this place is owed something more of your life, or because of flash floods, or for any other combination of reasons, sometimes you only get blisters and bee stings and a word of thanks. Sometimes you get a new friend. Sometimes you get butterflies, sometimes lukewarm soup. Sometimes you come home and, a day later, understand suddenly how you ought to live. Sometimes you only pull a deer guard into the sun and watch as ants scurry, water falls, spiders scatter, slugs slip, young moss tumbles over your knees. And sometimes, in the smallest of spaces, you get a new view of a new universe — seven thousand times. The transaction is impossibly uneven — it always was. And the dirt of it, because there is always dirt, will probably stick under your fingers for a long time to come.


— Alistair Herbert, "The Deer Guard: Planting Trees and Discovering New Worlds in the Upper Calder Valley," Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

May 2, 2019

from Shoreline of the Heart, by Joseph Murphy



In such a place, to be
meant no longer being bound
to where or when.


— Joseph Murphy, "Above Kloppenhiem," Shoreline of the Heart