QOTW 9-15 June 24

your weekly quotes

Image description a blue butterfly on green leaves. Photo taken by Charles Earl.

Sunday

Preparation is at the heart of survival.

PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA,

Poetry Unbound

, On preparation

For the known and not known

Monday

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

Joanna Maciejewska, a post that went viral on X/Twitter.

Tuesday

Sometimes you’re doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It’s not like you get to a point where you’re all right for the rest of your life.

 Patti Smith

posted by Jacob Wren @EverySongIveEve on X

Wednesday

we can be serious and silly and brilliant and stupid and fucked up and completely in our power all at once.

Rebecca Woolf

, on attending the marriage of my friend to herself and the pride and privilege of bearing witness to the awakening of women, the braid, Substack.

Thursday

The image of hem spoke to me about language’s material qualities, yet also signified its edge: a place where it might be pushed so far it falls off and changes completely. The name, Hem Press, followed.

Richard Capener (

The Emergency Kisses

), publisher of Hem Press in an interview in Periodicities in March 2023.

Friday

INTERVIEWER

There’s another line in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”—“I want to be unbearable”—that strikes me as exact and expressive of you as a writer.

CARSON

I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that it’s accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on people. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case.

from the Paris Review’s the Art of Poetry interview 88 with Anne Carson by Will Aiken

Saturday

It was a very bad childhood — for everybody, every member of the household, not just myself, I think — and I escaped it, barely, with years of trouble. But I did find the entire world, in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world.

Mary Oliver, On Being with Krista Tippett, transcript from podcast aired February 2015.

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