Do you ever notice as you write that no matter what there is on the written page, something appears to be in back of everything that is said, a little ghost? I judged that this ghost is there to remind us there is always more, an elsewhere, a hiddenness, a secondary form of speech, an eye blink…there is something more I do not say. Leave this little echo to haunt the poem. Do not give it form, but let it assume its own ghostlike shape.
Barbara Guest
It seems to me that the premise we ought to establish, in order both to avoid exclusion and to recognize difference, should be: never to uproot, remove, withdraw, a child or adult struck by destiny from her or his original, living environment.
Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, pp. 194-195
Have you ever had one of those moments when you know that you are being visited by your own future? They come so rarely and with so little fanfare, those moments. They're not particularly photogenic, there's no breach in the clouds to reveal the shining city on a hill. No folk-dancing children outside your bus, no production values to speak of -- just a glimpse of such quotidian, incontrovertible truth that after the initial shock at the supreme weirdness of it all, a kind of calm sets in. So this is to be my life.
David Rakoff
It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its “stars.”
F.L. Lucas, Style
