For more than a decade, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically.

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Midfield,
attached to nothing,
the skylark singing.

— Basho

It is silly: this constant falling, this ebullient animal / tumble, this dizzy, over-worded, breathless groping / to some place only named in ancient, unknown tongues. — John Belk

Even after we called the neighbors for water, more water, and the volunteer fire department came to mist the dying herd, cattle kept falling. They died all day long until even the sun grew tired of watching. — Darla Biel

There are four channels on the black and white TV which seem swept from the cosmic corners of an emptiness you’re learning about in school, along with Sex Ed and its ragged chalkboard diagrams of ungainly organs deployed with all the dignity of trying to smuggle accordions across state lines. — Simeon Berry

The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses. — Louise Bourgeois

What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself. — Louise Bourgeois

We are all born in Oklahoma, in a certain way. — Andrew Brusletten

One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know. … Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough. … So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness. — William S. Burroughs

With our thoughts we make the world. — from the Dhammapada, as translated by Thomas Byrom