Spicer Quotes & Sayings

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope. — Jack Spicer

And if all I know how to do is speak, it is for you that I shall speak. My lips shall speak for miseries that have no mouth, my voice shall be the liberty of those who languish in the dungeon of despair ... And above all my body as well as my soul, beware of folding your arms in the sterile attitude of spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of pain is not a proscenium. — Aime Cesaire

The Vega Gull is peacock blue with silver wings, more splendid than any bird I've known, and somehow mine to fly. She's called The Messenger, and has been designed and built with great care and skill to do what should be impossible - cross an ocean in one brave launch, thirty-six hundred miles of black chop and nothingness - and to take me with her. It — Paula McLain

There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original. — Joseph Haydn

No love is Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries ... — Jack Spicer

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it. — Tobias Wolff

one of the central themes associated with developing a sense of authenticity involves inventing plausible narratives of self. For instance, Charles Taylor (1992) argues that the modern desire for authenticity is often prompted by a feeling that our life is shattered and it is difficult, if not impossible, to piece our life together in a meaningful way. He suggests that reclaiming authenticity would entail the provision of a space where we can once again craft coherent narratives that bind our life together. — Andre Spicer

I started my teenage years singing in churches across America, and finally wound up on a big stage. — Amy Grant

What happened?"
"During the kiss?"
"No, with you and Caroline."
"Oh," he said. And then after a second, "Caroline is no longer suffering from personhood. — John Green

Dear child, there are few problems in life which kindness and common sense cannot make simple and manageable. — Mary Burchell

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
— Jack Spicer

See how weak prose is ... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. — Jack Spicer

At least we both know how shitty the world is. You wearing a
beard as a mask to disguise it. I wearing my tired smile. I
don't see how you do it. One hundred thousand university
students marching with you. Toward
A necessity which is not love but is a name. — Jack Spicer

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. — Jack Spicer

And I think that it is certainly possible that the objective universe can be affected by the poet. I mean, you recall Orpheus made the trees and the stones dance and so forth, and this is something which is in almost all primitive cultures. I think it has some definite basis to it. I'm not sure what. It's like telekinesis, which I know very well on a pinball machine is perfectly possible. — Jack Spicer

One Night Stand"

Listen, you silk-hearted bastard,
I said in the bar last night,
You wear those dream clothes
Like a swan out of water.
Listen, you wool-feathered bastard,
My name, just for the record, is Leda.
I can remember pretending
That your red silk tie is a real heart
That your raw wool suit is real flesh
That you could float beside me with a swan's touch
Of casual satisfaction.
But not the swan's blood.
Waking tomorrow, I remember only
Somebody's feathers and his wrinkled heart
Draped loosely in my bed. — Jack Spicer

It was hot, there was no shade, and we were once again waiting on "the word". Everyone was bitching about getting water or getting into the shade. The staff sergeant in charge of this detail was afraid to let anyone wander away in case the plane arrived. No one was having any luck in trying to get him to understand that if we die of thirst or a burst bladder, there would be no one to catch the damn airplane anyway. — W.R. Spicer

He tried to remove it as gently as he could, but it wouldn't budge so he gave it a pretty good jerk and it ripped the skin on my lip. He got the butt all right, only now I could feel and taste the blood that was starting to drip down from my lip onto my survival vest. "Christ, you're bleeding, am I gonna have to Medivac you as well? Hey Doc, Captain Spicer is bleeding heavily from his lip, what should I do?" "Well Captain, you could put a tourniquet around his neck." "Naw, he looks gray in the face already. — W.R. Spicer

For a prince to rescue her, most often a princess has to give him directions — Srividya Srinivasan

Industry and frugality, as the means of procuring wealth ... thereby [secures] virtue, it being more difficult for a man in want to act always honestly ... — Benjamin Franklin

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person. — Jack Spicer

It is a very ungentlemanly thing to read a private cigarette case. Algernon. Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. Jack. I am quite aware of the fact, and I don't propose to discuss modern culture. It isn't the sort of thing one should talk of in private. — Oscar Wilde

Until next time," Hansard said, "when hopefully, you won't have my father's vomit in your hair. — Derek Landy

The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy, — Jack Spicer

Well Dennis you don't have to hear any
of the mountain music they play here.
Telling the young lies so that they can learn to get old.
Favouring them
with biscuits. "It's a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to
Danville, declension on a three mile grade." In either case
collision course. You either pick up the music or you don't. — Jack Spicer

Beauty is so rare a th
Sing a new song
Real
Music
A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A
Visiting card
- from 15 False Propositions Against God [1958] — Jack Spicer

Basically, women have to prove they are strong at all times. And then when they go on the attack, they have to not appear mean because those women often get the label of being catty. — Julie Nixon Eisenhower

Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap? — Jack Spicer

ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN
BUT IT TAKES A GODDESS
TO GET OUT OF ONE. — Jack Spicer

In hell it is difficult to tell people from other people. — Jack Spicer

The poet is stepping out of the airplane. — Jack Spicer

What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands. — Simon Wiesenthal

I think you've forgotten that this place holds a lot more than just
betraying Hobgoblins. Call upon the spirits, summon fairies, raise the
dead! My brother, you have the power to do so
now get off of your butt
and use it! — Richard P. Denney

And under my breath I was telling it to hisht and for shame, and if I had known any swearing I would have had that in, too. — Richard Llewellyn

I made a date with her for the following week. Mid-week, I went for a ride in a T-28. The engine failed, the pilot slid the plane into the sand of the Mojave out near El Centro, and I slid into a hospital bed for about ten days at North Island Naval Air Station. While I was in the hospital, the CARDIV left for WestPac. I called Marguerite and told her what happened and that I wanted to see her again. I'm not sure she believed me, but agreed to another date. Unfortunately it had to be a short date because I had to head for Norton Air Force base to catch a flight for Hawaii, to meet up with the CARDIV. — W.R. Spicer

Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
- from Thing Language — Jack Spicer