“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”

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John Cage43

American avant-garde composer 1912–1992

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“Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

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“Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.”

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“We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

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“In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction”

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“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found—the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it.”

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“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

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“Nothing irritates us [Fascists] so much as to be taken for pillars of order. Nothing so exasperates us as the people who come to us through fear of Communism. Those good people [who are fearful of all social change] will have to realize, and we shall soon make them realize, that the weight of the social problem is now on our shoulders and that they would be wiser to fear us than to fear Communism.”

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“When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.”

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“These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.”

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“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”

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