Rat's Country: Quit yearning...

Quit yearning!  It is like bleeding, a seepage, a slow draining of hope.  It weakens you.  You could die from yearning and not even notice.

Rat's Country: "I want to tell you a really, really sad story..."

Me:  "I want to tell you a really, really sad story about someone who died tragically..."

Ninety-five year old mother:   "If they died, that's not a sad story."

Rat's Country: Easy for you to say, William Stafford

"Ideally, for me, poems are nothing special.  They are just the language without any mistakes."

Rat's Country: which is it?

We are all in the same boat.  No, each of us sails around the world alone.

Rat's Country: When I See Women Kiss...

"When I see women kiss, I think they hate each other."

A great quote from a Trollope novel, but I forgot to write down which one.

Rat's Country: When We Judge Distance...

"When we judge distance desired objects seem nearer..."
      
          Valerie Ross, "Closing the Gap," Scientific American Mind, July/August 2010

Oh, the implications...

Rat's Country: Blank Slate

"In a book he wrote about his beliefs, he left every other page blank so that if readers had better ideas than his they could write them in."
      
            from "Bachy and Visionaries," NYTimes Book Review, August 20, 1995