Category Archives: Quotations

Things people said.

The ‘Weird Causality’ of Passive Voice

Posted on July 20, 2023 by JMN

“Mistakes were made.” (Politicians from Nixon forward) Jamelle Bouie cites a passage from Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields: Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color”— a … Continue reading →

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Eco-ing How to Read Poetry

Posted on July 16, 2023 by JMN

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away. The same thing is true of poetry. Just recall how unbearable poems … Continue reading →

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‘Everything Floats’

Posted on June 30, 2023 by JMN

As for Fuji… it’s nothing but three quick strokes: a swoop to the top, a bobble for the summit, a long glide back to the ground. […] What Hokusai and his successors affirm over and over is that there’s no … Continue reading →

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The Case of the Bashful Punchline

Posted on June 25, 2023 by JMN

Jared Bartman. [New York Times illustration] “Is it ever easier?” a young writer asked me recently. “Do you ever grow a thicker skin?” She was suffering because an essay she’d written about the death of her mother had been rejected … Continue reading →

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A Tenacious Seeking of Certainty Sows More Doubt

Posted on June 15, 2023 by JMN

I’ve saved this passage by Kafka translator Ross Benjamin in my notes since early February. In re-reading it I realize anew how cogently it expresses my own experience of reading poetry, never mind translating it. It ends with a compelling … Continue reading →

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A Compelling Rationale for Taking Up Versifying

Posted on June 13, 2023 by JMN

Monet grew up in East New York in Brooklyn and started writing poetry when she was 8 because she was “fascinated by typewriters and people who would sit at typewriters,” she said. Monet fondly recalls her former college adviser: “I … Continue reading →

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Notes on Poetry (‘Expressing the Unsaid’)

Posted on May 26, 2023 by JMN

He was so handsome, so fine and flinty and long-boned, that he was a shock to be around — he made people stupid, or teary, or angry or skin-starved, sometimes all at once. (Dwight Garner) (Dwight Garner, “Sam Shepard and … Continue reading →

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On the Language Front

Posted on May 19, 2023 by JMN

This is a headline in USA Today: 3M fires long-time executive Michael Vale amid ‘inappropriate personal misconduct’ claims. We’re not savages. All misconduct, be it personal or professional, should be rigorously appropriate. This is from The New York Times: Ms. … Continue reading →

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Arabic and Me

Posted on May 17, 2023 by JMN

Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent… The beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may … Continue reading →

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From Darkness Into the Light

Posted on May 11, 2023 by JMN

A disgraced politician once promised his followers he’d win so much they’d get tired of all the winning. “Always remember any idiot can win,” Hugh Laurie’s father, an Olympic rowing medalist, told his son. “What he meant,” said Laurie, “was … Continue reading →

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