Leaflet Printing Quotes

In this part of America, 'R's' are the dissidents of the alphabet. They won't be ruled. Behind closed doors, they conspire and print leaflets. They make love to many women. They smoke cigarettes in place of eating food. Then, in front of witnesses with no recourse to justice, they are pulled from their beds in the middle of the night. Some are imprisoned. Some silenced. Others go missing. A few reappear sealed up in the wall of another word if they are found at all. Thus, a thought that is valued is truly an 'idear.' Wanda comes out as Wonder or Wander and both fit her.

Why couldn't they love the place, same way, together, the way he always loved her, even with his sore? Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather, in sickness and in health, its beauty in being poor? The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet printed with slogans of black people fighting war?

Yes, we've been spoiled by technology. We can't accept doing without loudspeakers or rotary presses. Handwritten placards and whispered proclamations just don't carry the same weight. Technology has devalued the impact of our own speech and writing. In the old days one man's call to arms was enough to set off an uprising - a few hand-printed leaflets, ninety-five theses nailed to a church door in Wittenberg. But today we need more, we need bigger and better, wider repercussions, mass-produced by machines and multiplied exponentially.

Some time ago my friend, Father Gilbert, sent me from Maryland a small leaflet, and on it it a sketch of water, sky, a boat and a solitary man, in blues and greens, and, a prayer. ...The few words are called "Breton Fishermen's Prayer' and they read: Dear God be good to me, The sea is so wide And my boat is so small. This is a prayer for us all, for the world is a wide sea and the vessel of our lives is small and vulnerable and there are reefs and rocks, tides and storms which we must encounter. But on the wide sea there is light...

Depend upon it, before you have been teaching for a term, everyone in the form knows pretty well 'the sort of stuff that goes down with Prickly Pop-eye.' In the crude old days they knew that what 'went down', and the only thing that 'went down', was correct answers to factual questions, and there were only two ways of producing those: working or cheating. The thing would not be so bad if the responses which the pupils had to make were even those of the individual master. But we have already passed that stage. Somewhere (I have not yet tracked it down) there must be a kind of culture-mongers' central bureau which keeps a sharp look-out for deviationists. At least there is certainly someone who sends little leaflets to schoolmasters, printing half a dozen poems on each and telling the master not only which the pupils must be made to prefer, but exactly on what grounds.

Propaganda! Propaganda! Propaganda! You must set up the most powerful radio stations in the world and answer the Communists in every language. You must employ the best writers and the best speakers you have, every skill of every sort, and meet the falsehoods and smash them. You must print cheap newspapers and leaflets in every language and flood every country with them. You must smuggle them into Russia by every device you can think of. It’s a war—they have declared it, and you have to pitch in and win.

Wanda, whatever she says, rides the same long breath whether she is greeting us or asking the existential questions no one else will dare. On sentences stripped of refinement and planed as smooth as wood, she does her best to navigate the changing currents in her yard and in ours. In this, she is true to her name as we pronounce it. In this part of America, “R’s” are the dissidents of the alphabet. They won’t be ruled. Behind closed doors, they conspire and print leaflets. They make love to many women. They smoke cigarettes in place of eating food. Then, in front of witnesses with no recourse to justice, they are pulled from their beds in the middle of the night. Some are imprisoned. Some silenced. Others go missing. A few reappear sealed up in the wall of another word if they are found at all. Thus, a thought that is valued is truly an “idear.

We saw our second surrender leaflet around the end of the year. A Boeing B-17 flew over our hideout and dropped a lot of big, thick pieces of paper. On the front were printed the surrender order from General Yamashita of the Fourteenth Area Army and a directive from the chief of staff. On the back was a map of Lubang on which the place where the leaflets were dropped was marked with a circle. We gathered together and considered whether the orders printed on the leaflet were genuine. I had my doubts about a sentence saying that those who surrendered would be given “hygienic succor” and “hauled” to Japan.