Don Paterson Quotes

You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

It's crazy isn't it?" She shook her head. "You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful." She shook her head again. "It's crazy.

I don't care. I don't care". He was crying now, crying so hard he could barely breathe.

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don't know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.

Don't tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don't need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you're after, my dear.

I can see exactly what not to do at the moment. No doubt through the usual process of elimination I'll arrive at my favourite strategy of total paralysis.

Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read.

While you spoke, it reached into the room  switching off the mirrors in their frames  and undeveloping your photographs; it gently drew a knife across the threads that tied your keepsakes to the things they kept

Fate's book, but my italics.

There are no guarantees of success, much less of quality. If you don’t dare to be a mediocre writer, you’ll never be a writer at all.

Dammit, Trotter. Don't try to make a stinking Christian out of me.

A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end.

If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

She looked at him as if she were going to argue, then seemed to change her mind. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don’t have to believe it, and I think it’s beautiful.” She shook her head again. “It’s crazy.

I feel very silly saying to you, Tell me all about yourself, but I wish you would. I want to get to know you." That's not how you get to know people. Don't you know? You can't talk it out, you've got to live into their lives, bad and good. You'll know me soon enough. What I want you to know.

Win was flabbergasted when he heard me say to the dog: “We don’t put our paws on the table while folks are eating, Manch.

If I start to write down my feelings, isn't that the same as writing down my problems? Won't it be dangerous? What if then I feel like I need to tell someone my problems? Will they be angry? Will they leave? "It's just a book", I tell myself. "It's just a book and a book can't leave me. A book can't decide who it wants to be with. The worst that can happen is I don't do it anymore, right? I'll give it a try.

Brenda burst in. “Do you know what some people do? They charge something and wear it, and then take it back and say it didn’t fit or something. The stores don’t give ’em no trouble.” Her father turned in a kind of roar. “I never heard such a fool thing in my life. Didn’t you hear your mother tell you to shut your mouth, girl!

Fashion, in Crisp’s view, is the art of denying one’s individuality in order to adopt the uniforms and dictates of culture, as determined by people who have never met you, and do not care whether you exist. The implicit goal is to cover your imperfections and become something you are not: a person who is acceptable in the eyes of others. A pleasing shell with no discernible interior. In Crisp’s words, “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.

His gaze moved from her face to the gun, then back to her face, an annoyingly smug expression creeping across his features. “I don’t think so. You ain’t got the first notion how to shoot that thing. Can’t even find the trigger, can you.” He took a menacing step toward her. Nicole raised her left brow. “You mean this trigger?” She cocked the hammer of the Colt Paterson revolver and released the folding trigger mechanism. Will stopped. “You forget, Will Jenkins—I’m a Renard. Daughter of Anton Renard and granddaughter to Henri Renard, privateer and compatriot of Jean Lafitte himself. I know a thing or two about weapons.

When I’m invisible I don’t have to feel anything. The pain and grief and fear goes away. I go numb and quiet.

Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time.

After a long period of reflection, he decided that he was in fact right yet again.

Falling and flying are near identical sensations, in all but one final detail.

feeling of when you think you can never stop laughing and you think if you don't stop, you'll burst in half and that makes you laugh even more, thinking about bursting and then when you stop, you are so tired but it is such a happy tired.

Experiments in attachment. My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband. I meet him in the cafe; he looks terrible - his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot... He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar... He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.

A book is a cooperative venture. The writer can write a story down, but the book will never be complete until a reader of whatever age takes that book and brings it to his own story. So please don’t ask me where I get my ideas as if I were some creature foreign to you who drinks at an alien watering trough. Don’t ask me where I get my ideas as though you have no part, no responsibility, in bringing what you read to life. It is only when the deepest sound going forth from my heart meets the deepest sound coming forth from yours - it is only in this encounter that the true music begins.

Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity.

He tries to put a huge spoon of ice cream in my mouth but I refuse to let him and keep it shut until finally he lets me handle the spoon myself. I gulp a mouthful down making tiny noises because I have swallowed too much and it is freezing my teeth. He is still laughing at me while he waits until my face returns to normal—I have tears in my eyes from the cold—and then says, “So, what do you think? Come on, say you like it.” “It’s… well, it’s intense,” I say. I’m surprising myself. There are unexpected words coming out of my mouth. The ice cream has given me a sudden burst of confidence. “It’s muddy. It’s complicated.” Liam looks at me with a great big grin. “Muddy? Intense? Complicated?” he says. He laughs again. “I’m very surprised you don’t like it. Because if it’s intense, muddy and complicated, it’s exactly like you.” I don’t know what to say. Is he serious, or is this a joke? I just can’t tell so I look at him for a few seconds. Eventually I sign what do you mean? and I see he’s worried. “Oh, no, it’s not bad,” he says. He’s definitely backpedalling. He thinks he has upset me and now he is trying to reassure me. “You know, muddy, intense and complicated in a good way, right?” he says smiling. Now he’s making a joke.

he said, ‘I don’t understand.

Critics all have this idea that authors inhabit another dimensional realm, right up to their first smack in the mouth - which feels to them quite miraculous, being their sex-dream come true.

Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice.

The aphorism is already a shadow of itself.

There have been many times you have been drinking tea and didn't know it, because you were absorbed in worries . . . . If you don't know how to drink your tea in mindfulness and concentration, you are not really drinking tea. You are drinking your sorrow, your fear, your anger—and happiness is not possible.

We always look good. (“ No!” chimed in Lise. “Perfect!”) We don’t get fat. (“No chocolate or chips,” mourned Isabella. “Or chocolate chips either.” She giggled at her own joke.) We don’t associate with losers. (“We don’t talk to losers, we don’t look at losers, we don’t flirt with losers, we don’t go out with losers,” said Tiger Lily.) There are no secrets. (This is where Saffron spoke up, opening her big blue eyes wide. “We can’t risk our reputations. We don’t want to get surprised if we hear about something you’ve done that might make us look bad. What you do is our business now that you’re in our group. Soooo,” and she shrugged her shoulders, “we need you to be completely honest.”) There are consequences for breaking the rules. (Here no one said anything. Isabella looked scared, Lise looked down, Saffron looked superior and Tiger Lily just looked at me full in the face, narrowing her eyes.) At

This is a picture of him from 1919, just after the war, looking like he slept in that uniform all the way from France. He still had that face, but he wasn't the same. I know there's men who came back changed: the Paterson boy up in Brownville hung himself that summer. Nobody talked about it much, and I suppose that was for the best. But Jack wasn't like that; it hadn't been a terrible thing for him, I don't think. Or if it had been, then it was one of those terrible things you get through and it sets you free.

No, I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m worried I’ll be found out. I’m scared of losing my friends. I’m scared of being a nobody again. And I don’t want Shalini to be mean to me. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to stand up for myself. But I’m scared of what might happen if I don’t. And I have no one to talk to, no one to tell all of this too because I’m afraid they’ll leave me if I let it out.

Don’t tell people your problems, Jaz,” she tells me. “Don’t show them either.

forget the ink, the milk, the blood - all was washed clean with the flood we rose up from the falling waters the fallen rain's own sons and daughters and none of this, none of this matters.

But it’s part of life. And if you don’t ever feel bad, you can never feel glorious either.

because they have to write with their hand all twisted around so that they don’t get ink all over their arms.

Even the most apparently autobiographical poem cannot help but deploy a persona that, while gesturing towards a flesh-and-bones speaker, remains, paradoxically, no more than a dramatised representation. The illusion of the presence of the poet within a poem is made possible by that poem’s conjuring of the illusion of the present moment. Poems may utilise language in such ways as to gesture towards an immediacy that, in turn, gives rise to the seeming presence of a very real speaker.

Don’t tell anyone your problems

The lies are of a scale and of a nature that in modern political life I think you can only compare to Donald Trump. I don't think anybody has lied or can lie as casually and as cooly and as completely as Boris Johnson does - accept Boris Johnson. We have learned over the last few weeks that his closest colleagues thought he was diabolical. The cabinet secretary that Boris Johnson appointed because he would prove to be, or he was believed to be, a soft touch has described Boris Johnson as being utterly unfit for the job. The advisor that he brought in as a sort of mastermind - having overseen Brexit - Dominick Cummings has described Johnson in terms that you would reserve for your worst enemies. These are the people working closest by him. The only person who's had anything vaguely warm to say about him is Matt Hancock and let me tell you why. They've shaken hands on it. I'd bet my house on some sort of gentleman's... let's rephrase that... I'd bet my house on some sort of charlatan’s agreement behind the scenes that they won't slag each other off because everybody else is telling the truth about them - about Johnson and about Hancock. Hancock's uselessness facilitated and enabled by Johnson's uselessness, by Johnson's moral corruption effectively. And now the lies begin. 5,000 WhatsApp messages. ‘No idea. No, no, no, no idea. Don't know. Don't know technical people. Uh... factory reset. Don't know. Bleep, bleep.’ And then the classic: the flooding of the Zone. With so much manure that it's hard to know where to start. ‘We may have made mistakes’ is one of the latest statements to come out. Turns up 3 hours early so that he doesn't have to walk the gamut of people congregating to remember their lost loved ones and to share their feelings with the man that they consider to be partly responsible for their death. Absolutely extraordinary scenes, truly extraordinary scenes. How does he get away with it? Hugo Keith is a much tougher inquisitor than Lindsay flipping Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons. He's a much tougher inquisitor than any of the interviewers that Boris Johnson deigns to have his toes tickled by on a regular basis. He's a much tougher interviewer or scrutineer than the newspaper editors who have given him half a million pounds a year to write columns or already published articles about why he's the real victim in this story. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph today writing an article before Boris Johnson has given a single syllable of evidence, claiming that Boris Johnson is the real victim of this. I'd love him to go and read that out to the Covid families assembled outside the inquiry. And remember it was Daily Telegraph columnists and former editors that convened at the Club with Jacob Rees-Mogg and others to launch the Save Owen Paterson Society after another one of these charlatans was found to have breached parliamentary standards. Their response of course was not to advise their ally to accept the punishment that was coming his way but to attempt to get him off the hook and rip up the rule book under which he'd been found to be guilty.

I sit in my hammock chair in my room at home and take out my hearing aid, start a gentle rock and slowly close my eyes. I begin to melt until I am no one. I don’t exist. No one can see me.

I’m nervous again. “Um, are you sure?” I say. “I mean, you don’t have to invite me if you don’t want to…” My voice trails off. She looks at me with a face that says, what are you talking about? and frowns slightly, shrugging. “Yeah, of course.

You don’t need guns to start a war. A mobile phone will do.

Author’s Note This series of stories are set in Australia and use Aussie words, expressions and spelling. We say ‘mum’ to rhyme with ‘thumb’. Year 9 is the same as ninth grade and high school begins in Year 7 and goes all the way through to Year 12. Christmas is in the summer. We do maths, not math, and we spell analyse (and a bunch of other words) with an ‘s’, not a ‘z’. In fact, lots of our spelling is just slightly different, so don’t get worried if it’s not what you’re used to.

There are going to be so many people who like you, and who love you, in your life. Don’t confine yourself to the manipulative loser control-freaks of this world just because you think you’re not good enough for anyone else.

have to talk to Mr West. I’m sure he’ll be able to help you.’ ‘We’ll do that, Mrs Clegg,’ replied Fitzjohn. ‘Now, I don’t want to keep you too much longer but Mr Van Goren arrived at the Observatory last evening in a taxi so I take it he didn’t

East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school “a mecca of education” and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300 students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs. “He was a perfect hero,” says a school official who has dinner with me the next evening, “for an age in which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn’t know he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a jail. Bennett created Joe Clark as a hero for white people. He was on the cover of Time magazine. Parents and kids were held in thrall after the president endorsed him. “In certain respects, this set a pattern for the national agenda. Find black principals who don’t identify with civil rights concerns but are prepared to whip black children into line. Throw out the kids who cause you trouble. It’s an easy way to raise the average scores. Where do you put these kids once they’re expelled? You build more prisons. Two thirds of the kids that Clark threw out are in Passaic County Jail. “This is a very popular approach in the United States today. Don’t provide the kids with a new building. Don’t provide them with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don’t even breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so they can’t subvert the education of the suburbs. Don’t permit them ‘frills’ like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell them they’re no good if they can’t pass the state exam. Then, when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it needed space to build a jail?

My boy is painting outer space, and steadies his brush-tip to trace the comets, planets, moon and sun and all the circuitry they run in one great heavenly design. But when he tries to close the line he draws around his upturned cup, his hand shakes, and he screws it up. The shake’s as old as he is, all (thank god) his body can recall of the hour when, one inch from home, we couldn’t get the air to him; and though today he’s all the earth and sky for breathing-space and breath the whole damn troposphere can’t cure the flutter in his signature. But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant. The dream is taxed. We all resent the quarter bled off by the dark between the bowstring and the mark and trust to Krishna or to fate to keep our arrows halfway straight. But the target also draws our aim - our will and nature’s are the same; we are its living word, and not a book it wrote and then forgot, its fourteen-billion-year-old song inscribed in both our right and wrong - so even when you rage and moan and bring your fist down like a stone on your spoiled work and useless kit, you just can’t help but broadcast it: look at the little avatar of your muddy water-jar filling with the perfect ring singing under everything.

For one week, don’t agree to anything until you’ve said to yourself, That’s a request. I can choose to say yes or no. Then, let yourself respond or put off a response until you’ve had time to think.