Aphorisms

To love is to forgive in others what one hates in oneself.

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Socialism was only a theory when capitalism was already a behavior and then afterwards an ideology which spawned theory itself.

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Proponents of intersectionality seem oblivious that their political position reflects the fragmented, short-attention-spanned, hash-tagged, click-baiting mental mode shared with social media — a tail being wagged by the dog.

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A true translator looks away from the words themselves.

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Most of the coincidences in life are noticeable only to oneself. 

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Don’t pick the scab of a memory. It might start bleeding.

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What is a poem but a recipe with which to compose again a dish of feelings and thoughts we once consumed?

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In love, as in music, opening chords and the melodies of first movements are what we remember best.

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Since people lie to themselves, naturally they lie to others.

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The old readily mistake senility for wisdom.

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Like stars, words glom together by their own logic. Then we make constellations.

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We can’t imagine heat when we are cold / nor the anxiety of youth when old.

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Amazon, Google, Netflix and Wiki are the Encyclopedists of our time, progeny of what Eurocentric historians like to call the Enlightenment. This is not necessarily a good thing.

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Is a kite free if it breaks its string?

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Oblomov would have loved the iPad.

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To read a poem in translation is to pledge troth to a ghost, a wispy, intangible presence  another world you can never touch without crossing over to it.

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Sometimes in the still of night we write poems instead of dream.

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Where there is no censorship, isn’t it reasonable to conclude nothing anyone says threatens the established order?

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Reading  is one way of not writing.

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No tree says, better flowering than bearing fruit. Only lovers.

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Social life is a delicate balance between laziness and vanity.

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The notion that books be judged by their ethical content is the first step on the slippery slope towards banning and then burning them.

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Just as there are false memories, there is false nostalgia, the pain, algos, of yearning for a time and place you never were, nor could even have been.

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Hunger is the true heart-beat of the healthy.

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Our willing participation in social media is a new and invidious form of confession, which should understood as the most intimate instrument of institutional power and control. As we delineate and expose our wishes, wants and needs, our likes and dislikes, we willingly provide the information necessary for our own manipulation and subjugation. Unless we learn to simulate, dissemble, bluff, fake, counterfeit, feign or sham, we make our selves into subjects. Never tell the truth. Never turn yourself in.

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I revel in etymologies, since the genuine meaning of words is repressed, like memories of childhood.

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It is not so much the nanny state I am worried about as the nanny culture in which we live.

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 Wearing the dress of others when you are in a foreign culture is not an expression of deviant exoticism, rather of acceptance, of willingness to share bodily sensations. There is no embrace more intimate except the one without any clothes.