I would say that life at 84, I am having as much fun as I've ever had in my life. I mean I get to do what I love every day with the people I love-and it just doesn't get any better than that.
Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet
Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding. . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.
Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
from one thing, know ten thousand things
Do reasons matter when there's nothing that can be done to change things.
I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.
We just were a band one day. We woke up and in the morning we were a band.