Mary Jo Bang Quotes & Sayings

T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind. — Mary Jo Bang

What is desire but the hard wire argument given to the mind's unstoppable mouth — Mary Jo Bang

A child, then a man, now a feather / Passing through a furious fire / Called time. — Mary Jo Bang

Why are you not where you belong? / A black hat on a hook says nothing. / Ashes mirror ashes / In a mirroring window. — Mary Jo Bang

The wheel begins its only if turning. / It had never stopped. / This is life's bargain that motion / Is hope. — Mary Jo Bang

I say every dog looks like no other
but that isn't true. Not entirely.
Difference is slippery. — Mary Jo Bang

You are reduced / To the after-sorrow / That will last my lifetime. The hair-tearing / Grief of the mother / Whose child has been swept away. — Mary Jo Bang

To say you loved a person. / To say that person no longer exists. / A tragic flawed fate going on and on and on. — Mary Jo Bang

You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw — Mary Jo Bang

Bertrand Russell said, 'Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.' And it's not 'they' who say, but Walter Benjamin who said, 'Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness, with the base and the banal.' In September, 1940, Benjamin died under ambiguous circumstances in the French-Spanish border town of Portbou, while attempting to flee the Nazis. — Mary Jo Bang

And now the question: what do we do with the longing
for what can destroy us? — Mary Jo Bang