Guest Diary• BY:
Jill Krementz
There’s not much to say about these photographs I’ve taken over the years. I think the subjects speak for themselves.
The portraits are in alphabetical order.
“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”
“To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”
“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself.”
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
― “We Real Cool” from Selected Poems.
“It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”
“It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.”
“The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.”
“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.”
“What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.”
“I do not ‘get’ ideas; ideas get me.”
“I’m no longer accepting the things I cannot change … I’m changing the things I cannot accept.”
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader — not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
“If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.”
“Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.”
“Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.”
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
“Genius is immediate, but talent takes time.”
“People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it’s a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that’s one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.”
“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”
“A lot of people refuse to do things because they don’t want to go naked, don’t want to go without guarantee. But that’s what’s got to happen. You go naked until you die.”
“Science is an integral part of culture. It’s not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It’s one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.”
“… in Aristotle … leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work … leisure is pursued solely for its own sake …: the pleasures of music and poetry, … conversation with friends, and … gratuitous, playful speculation.”
“The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”
“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme
So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge.”
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
“Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage and death.”
“Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.”
“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.”
“A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don’t see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.”
“The one-and-only moments are justified. The return to them, even if temporarily, is valid. The moment over the marmalade and muffins is valid; the moment feeding the child at the breast is valid; the moment racing with him at the beach is valid. Finding shells together, polishing chestnuts, sharing one’s treasures: all these moments of together-aloneness are valid, but not permanent.”
“Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella.” — Spoken by a character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa
“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.”
“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
“On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.”
“The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive.”
“The black woman is both a ship and a safe harbor.”
“Black men of our day were never told, The sky’s the limit. … We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.” ― Little Green: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”
“I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”
“When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.”
“Caress the detail, the divine detail.”
“My poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.”
“Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small it takes time — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
“Most of the Women’s Libbers I knew really didn’t want to have a piece of the men’s pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn’t even want a slice of.”
“I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.”
“The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.” — Ship of Fools
“Between 1950 and 1955, I figured out my style. The real change occurred between 1953 and 1954. It had to do with my eye makeup. Everyone said I looked like Nefertiti. I don’t, but that’s how I got the idea.”
“A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!”
“It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.”
“Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.”
“I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”
“There is no power on earth that can loosen a man’s grip on his own throat.”
“When people say, ‘She’s got everything,’ I’ve got one answer — I haven’t had tomorrow.”
“This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.”
“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
“If I got rid of my demons I’d lose my angels.”
