Category Archives: Quotes

Barbara Kingsolver, excerpted from Deadline, Another America

There is poetry and then there is poetic prose…

“The polls have sung their opera of assent: the land wants war. But here is another America, candle-throated, sure as tide. Whoever you are, you are also this granite anger. In history you will be the vigilant dead who stood in front of every war with old hearts in your pockets, stood on the carcass of hope listening for the thunder of its feathers.

The desert is diamond ice and only stars above us here and elsewhere, a thousand issues of a clear waxed star, a holocaust of heaven and somewhere, a way out. ”

by Maya Angelou

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares
which will not withdraw from us.

We need hours of aimless wandering or
spates of time sitting on park benches,
observing the mysterious world of ants
and the canopy of treetops.