Graham Blanks Quotes

Sylvester Graham, he of the eponymous health-food cracker, claimed that a man who could make it to the age of thirty without giving in to the temptations of his sexual urges would be a veritable god.

Spasm couldn’t get laid if you sent him to a brothel with a blank cheque. He had his Lou Reed and his Bob Hope, but never his Nat King Cole.

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship. Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn. As they stared blankly, in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realized all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses, and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces, and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.

Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning.

The Younger Dryas impacts, and subsequent sustained cataclysm, changed the face of the earth completely and wrought particularly significant havoc across North America. We have considered the question of huge volumes of meltwater released into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from the destabilized ice sheet and looked at the effects on global climate. But keep in mind that those enormous floods also devastated the rich North American mainland to the south, perhaps the best and most bounteous real estate then available anywhere. This immense and extraordinary deluge, 'possibly the largest flood in the history of the world,' swept away and utterly demolished everything that lay in its path. Jostling with icebergs, choked by whole forests ripped up by their roots, turbulent with mud and boulders swirling in the depths of the current, what the deluge left behind can still be seen in something of its raw form in the Channeled Scablands of the state of Washington today--a devastated blank slate [...] littered with 10,000-ton 'glacial erratics,' immense fossilized waterfalls, and 'current ripples' hundreds of feet long and dozens of feet high. If there were cities there, before the deluge, they would be gone. If there was any evidence of anything that we would recognize as technology there, before the deluge, it would be gone.

Surrendering to Christ is like signing your name to a blank check and letting the Lord put in the amount.

Painting is the same. I dip my brush in color. Use it to peel away the blank canvas to unveil the truth underneath. I

I had no memory at all of Sarah and I was completely free from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, hate: my mind was a blank sheet on which somebody had just been on the point of writing a message of happiness. I felt sure that when my memory came back, the writing would continue and that I should be happy.

Two of my teachers made a huge positive difference for me. One was my football coach who did not think I was a loser, and encouraged me to stay in school and keep trying. The other was a special ed teacher who realized that I had a reading disability but that I wasn’t retarded. She honestly told me that she wasn’t trained to help people with dyslexia but that she knew it existed and that it wasn’t my fault. She knew how hard I was trying. She spent a year teaching me to fill in the blanks on paperwork such as job applications so I would have that skill when I needed it. She also let me leave class early so I could saunter into the lunch room from the direction of the “regular” classrooms so other kids wouldn’t know I was a SPED.” —Eddie—

Now, we can access “software” to create a treatment plan for a client instead of a “storage cabinet.” Now we navigate through “treatment planning modules” and these modules are filled with drop down menus and self-populating objectives. We think we are no longer doing fill-in-the blanks. But we are only fooling ourselves.

Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.

The easy things—just getting a blank mind to take in knowledge and become trainable—we have done. Now comes the difficult part. To get literate and numerate minds to be more innovative, to be more productive, is not easy. It requires a mindset change, a different set of values.

Difficulty is not, of course, a reason to reject or ignore a poem. Especially in reading the poetry of the twentieth century, one often willingly assents to Allen Tate’s statement that “poetry . . . demands both in its writing and in its reading all the intellectual power that we have.” There is a distinction, however, between the difficulty of obscurity and the difficulty of complexity. The latter emerges naturally from any attempt to capture a new feeling or idea for poetry. But with Graham, as with so many self-consciously modernist poets, the difficulty seems to fall into the first category. Her poems are obscure because they seem unfinished, because they reside in the privacy of the poet’s mind and not in the public realm where poet and reader discuss things in common. As long as Graham asks the reader to fill in her blanks and solve for her x’s, she has not realized poetry’s greatest and most enduring possibilities.

Does this verse mean God gives us a blank check (so to speak) when we pray? Does He promise to give us anything we want, if we just keep asking? No. God loves us too much to answer prayers that are foolish or might harm us. But the closer we get to Him—the more we abide in Him and His word abides in us—the more we will desire what He desires, and the more our prayers will reflect His will.