Dana Gioia quotes

" Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks. " # Money

" How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark. " # Death and Dying # Time and Time Management # Thoughts and Thinking

" The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale. " # Music # Simplicity # Speech

" Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the nearest road, a spot so hard to reach that no one comes — a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies and nesting jays, a sign that there is still one piece of property that won't be owned. " # Worry # Love # Dance and Dancing

" Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper — metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember. " # Shame # Books - Reading # Love

" This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere — like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed. " # Prayer # Love # Friends and Friendship

" We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost. " # Death and Dying

" My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen. " # Heaven # Death and Dying # Love

" "We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed we always chose to kill. "We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim, And when we died, they laid us on her breast, But she refuses us — until we earn Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed." " # Love # Forgiveness # Money

" "Teach us the names of what we have destroyed." " # Teachers and Teaching