Quotes about peach

A collection of quotes on the topic of peach, doing, love, world.

Quotes about peach

“You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches.”

Dita Von Teese (1972) American burlesque dancer, model and actress

“Listen, Peaches, is what humans are all about," said the voice of Maurice. "They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Time

“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Education, Training

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2

“My body, now close to fifty years of age, has become an old tree that bears bitter peaches, a snail which has lost its shell, a bagworm separated from its bag; it drifts with the winds and clouds that know no destination. Morning and night I have eaten traveler's fare, and have held out for alms a pilgrim's wallet.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Genjūan no Fu ("Prose Poem on the Unreal Dwelling") in Donald Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, p. 374 (Translation: Donald Keene)
Statements

Age, Travel, Tree, Night

“There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

World, Beauty, Light, Waiting

“Cheeses crusty, got all musty, got damp on the stone of a peach,” I agreed. He looked blank, so I repeated it with proper emphasis. “ ChEEZ-zes crusty. Got Al -musty. Got DAMp on the StoneofapeaCH.”

Patricia Briggs book Iron Kissed

Source: Iron Kissed

“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Family, Baby, Night

“Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together…”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Love

“Cheeses crusty, got all musty, got damp on the stone of a peach.”

Patricia Briggs book Iron Kissed

Source: Iron Kissed

“When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

Spring, Painting

“Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Age, Childhood, Painting

“You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom,
The water flows.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

World, Smile, Home, Soul

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

Death, World, Spring, Grass

“Inside the peach, there is a stone.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

“A strong relationship is an honest relationship, and no honest relationship is all peaches and cream. Love is the key. Where love abides, anger is but a passing visitor.”

Jerry Spinelli (1941) American children's writer

Source: Today I Will: A Year of Quotes, Notes, and Promises to Myself

Love, Strong, Anger

“As sure as peaches are poison.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

New Spring

“The walls were wet and sticky, and peach juice was dripping from the ceiling. James opened his mouth and caught some of it on his tongue. It tasted delicious.”

Roald Dahl James and the Giant Peach

Source: James and the Giant Peach

“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Source: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

Parting

“Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Source: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

Life, Death

“Come clean with a child heart
Laugh as peaches in the summer wind
Let rain on a house roof be a song
Let the writing on your face
be a smell of apple orchards on late June.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Source: Honey and Salt

Heart, Summer, Housing

“I’m an innocent, brown-eyed child of the sun. Just a peach-picker’s boy from the West Side. Riverbank. My father’s a janitor with only a third-grade education and my mother makes tortillas at 5:00 A. M. before she goes to the cannery.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 54.

Education, Boy, Sun

“She is pale but affectionate, clinging to his arm — always clinging to his arm. Any one can see that she is a peach and of the cling variety.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

"A Tempered Wind"
The Gentle Grafter (1908)

“My former health minister, Kamran Bagheri Lankarani, is like a peach. I love to eat him.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/world-article.php?yyyy=2009&mm=08&dd=24&nav_id=61346 <br class="br">2009

Love, Health

“I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees (2002)

Beauty, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

Soul

“My beloved wife Peaches was adored by myself and her two sons. I shall bring them up with their mother in their hearts every day. We shall love her forever.”

Thomas Cohen (1990) British singer

As quoted in the Jewish Chronicle, 11 April 2014, p. 5

Love, Heart

“When I'am outlining the skin of a lovely peach with soft touches of paint, or a sad old apple, I catch a glimpse in the reflections they exchange of the same mild shadow of renunciation, the same love of the sun, the same recollection of the dew... Why do we divide up the world? Does this reflects our egoism?... The prism is our first step towards God, our seven beatitudes.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 220 in: 'What he told me – III. The Studio'

Love, God, World, Sadness

“A man bites into a dry peach and says "This peach is not good;" the peach replies "It is not my fault that you don't know the proper use for a dry peach."”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

A quote from the special inclusions in the sheet music book for her album "Under the Pink".
Songs

“I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

"Pastures of Plenty" (1941)

Light

“O'er seas that have no beaches
To end their waves upon,
I floated with twelve peaches,
A sofa and a swan.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Poem O'er seas that have no beaches

Sea

“My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Inhale and Exhale (1936), Antranik and the Spirit of Armenia

Way, Drink, Bird, Tree

“There's your Karma ripe as peaches.”

Jack Kerouac book Desolation Angels

Desolation Angels (1965)

“He said I was a flower of the mountain, yes,
But now I've powers o'er a woman's body, yes.
Stepping out of the page into the sensual world.
Stepping out…
To where the water and the earth caress
And the down on a peach says mmh, Yes…”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

"The Sensual World"; The lyrics of this song are derived from the last lines of Ulysses by James Joyce. Kate had initially wanted to set much of Molly Bloom's Soliloquy to music, just as Joyce had written it, but when the Joyce estate refused, she altered it enough as to not infringe on copyright. As she explained it in an interview: "The song was saying "Yes, Yes" and when I asked for permission they said "No! No!".
Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

World, Mountain, Flowers, Water

“At one point we got some German sausages for dinner, and my girl Anna was working the communal tomato sauce pump and she whacked it and it all squirted over my pants, and suddenly there was silence, and I realised that Muse had stopped playing, and the entire 20 odd thousand punters were looking at me, and suddenly I just threw my hands up and said ‘anyone for sauce?’ and everyone just burst into laughter and suddenly Peaches was there and she said ‘you’re alright kid’ and we high fived and then I crowd surfed all the way onto stage and Muse let me play the guitar solo for one of their songs and even though I’d never heard it I just winged it and it was awesome.”

Justin Heazlewood (1980) Australian musician and comedian

online Laptopping http://www.bedroomphilosopher.com/2007/02/20/laptopping-things-oclock/, Bedroom Philosopher (February 20, 2007).

Way, Girl, Communication, Laughter

“Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out — Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest — they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life, Happiness, Books, Education

“Immigration is not a simple issue. There are at least three major parts of it: there’s border security, legal immigration, and the status of the 11 million, 15 million, 30 million … pick a number – it’s the status of the folks who are here illegally. People say, ‘oh, comprehensive reform is a bad idea.’ Ok? But, unless you deal with all three of those you haven’t dealt with immigration. There are jobs that American citizens will not do. There are jobs that American citizens will not do. We can talk about why that is. We can talk about how our welfare state is broken, how we encourage people not to work, but that doesn’t help the farmer pick his peaches this summer. We have businesses that rely on migrant – legal – migrant workers, and a lot of them are in this state”

Mick Mulvaney (1967) Director of the Office of Management and Budget

Mick Mulvaney's Summer Of Apostasy http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/06/08/mick-mulvaneys-summer-of-apostasy/ (June 2014)

People, Idea, Business, Help

“U walked in (I walked in)
I woke up (U woke up)
I never seen a pretty girl look so tough' baby (baby)
U got that look, yes U do (yes U do)
Color U peach and black
Color me takin' aback, baby
Crucial, I think I wantcha.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

U Got the Look
Song lyrics, Sign O' the Times (1987)

Color, Girl, Thinking, Baby

“God not only told them what to do and how to live before the Flood, He also told them what to eat. He gave them a perfect diet. God said, I want you to eat the herbs. Kids, eat your vegetables, the fruit, and the seeds (Genesis 1:29). We don't do that much. We eat the hamburger, french fries, and Coke. God said eat the fruit, vegetables, and seeds. When you eat the fruit, you should eat the seed. When you eat a peach, eat the seed. You say that thing's hard. Well, crack it open with a hammer. The seed is inside the hull, okay. […] Now be sure to get organically grown seeds, not the ones grown on steroids and pesticides. But the seeds contain a bitter substance called cyanide. That'll give you a pucker that'll last about an hour and a half. […] But these seeds contain a vitamin called vitamin B-17 which is half cyanide. You say, oh, that's poison. Oh, it's not either! […] So the cyanide found in the seeds is mixed with benzaldehyde. Both are poison, but together they're harmless. Until they bump into a cancer cell!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

God, Perfection

“Princess Peach is in many ways the quintessential stock-character version of the damsel in distress.”

Anita Sarkeesian (1983) American blogger

<i>Damsel in Distress: Part 3 (Aug 1, 2013)</i>
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games (Feminist Frequency, 2013 - 2015)

Way, Princess

“Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

"Our Lady of the Loudspeaker" in The New Yorker (25 February 1928)

Life, Books, Effort, Sincerity

“The moon had broken up into seven large pieces, which inevitably became known as the Seven Sisters, and an uncountable number of smaller ones. Gradually the big ones acquired names. Doc Dubois was responsible for many of these. He gave them descriptive names that wouldn’t scare people. It wouldn’t do to call them Nemesis or Thor or Grond. So instead it was Potatohead, Mr. Spinny, Acorn, Peach Pit, Scoop, Big Boy, and Kidney Bean.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"The Seven Sisters"; Book reviewers commonly compared the character DuBois Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D. (aka Doc Dubois or Doob) to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Seveneves (2015), Part One

People, Boy, Sister

“The ripest peach is highest on the tree.”

James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) American poet from Indianapolis

The Ripest Peach.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Tree

“I asked a thief to steal me a peach:
He turned up his eyes.
I asked a lithe lady to lie her down:
Holy and meek, she cries.

As soon as I went
An angel came.
He winked at the thief
And smiled at the dame—

And without one word said
Had a peach from the tree,
And still as a maid
Enjoyed the lady.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

I Asked a Thief
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792)

Lie, Smile, Angels, Tree

“[Doc Dubois] had been focusing all of his attention in the other direction, on Peach Pit and its iron-rich “children,” PP1, PP2, and PP3, nailing down their exact orbital parameters, taking high-res photographs.
PP3 was especially interesting. It was a congealed glob of mostly iron, similar in composition to Amalthea. It was some fifty kilometers in diameter. And it had a deep cleft on one side, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, apparently formed by a collision that had rent its outer skin while it was partly congealed. Doob had begun calling PP3 Cleft.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Day 700"
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

Children

“Now hear it, O inhabitants of the earth, Jew and Gentile, Saint and sinner! When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize this world. He is MICHAEL, the Archangel, the ANCIENT OF DAYS! about whom holy men have written and spoken-He is our FATHER and our GOD, and the only God with whom WE have to do. Every man upon the earth, professing Christians or non-professing, must hear it, and will know it sooner or later. They came here, organized the raw material, and arranged in their order the herbs of the field, the trees, the apple, the peach, the plum, the pear, and every other fruit that is desirable and good for man; the seed was brought from another sphere, and planted in this earth. The thistle, the thorn, the brier, and the obnoxious weed did not appear until after the earth was cursed. When Adam and Eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit, their bodies became mortal from its effects, and therefore their offspring were mortal…It is true that the earth was organized by three distinct characters, namely, Eloheim, Yahovah, and Michael, these three forming a quorum, as in all heavenly bodies, and in organizing element, perfectly represented in the Deity, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 1:50-51 (April 9, 1852)
This concept is commonly referred to as the "Adam–God theory."
1850s

Men, God, World, Tree

“You ask me why do I dwell in these green mountains,
But I smile without a reply, only an easy mind.
The river flows away silently, bearing the fallen peach blossoms,
Here is another world, but not the world of men.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"Question and Answer in the Mountain" https://books.google.ca/books?id=hQ6lGvyMZMMC&pg=PA15

Men, World, Smile, Mountain

“What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

The Garden (1650-1652)

Life, Flowers, Grass, Wine

“I give all my printed books to Samuel Peach, son of Samuel Peach, in my Will named, and desire that this may be a codicil to my last Will and Testament, and taken as part thereof, as witness my hand, this third day of December. in the year of our Lord 1761.”

James Bradley (1693–1762) English astronomer; Astronomer Royal

Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence (1832), Memoirs of Mr. Bradley

Books, Parting

“My grandmother would shanghai pilots at the Havana airport so they'd bring me cartons of mango baby food -- the only kind I'd eat. I learned to eat peach later. And in every carton, she'd slip in a Cuban record.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

www.miamiherald.com
2007, 2008

Food, Learning, Baby

“That same night I went into the chicken coop, took my hooked knife which I used to pit peaches with, and carved her initials on the back side of my left hand … JA. Jane Addison. My first true love. The original Miss It. I was in such a fog that I forgot to cover it with a glove or something. At supper, right in front of my mother, my brother Bob said in a loud voice, “What’s that on your hand?” I pretended not to hear. I quickly switched my fork to my right hand and put my left hand under the table. “Hey, mom. Oscar cut himself,” the bastard said. “What?””

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

she cried out. She couldn’t stand violence unless it was part of some beating to teach me respect.
Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 89.

Love, Moms, Parting, Night

“Make no mistake about that. The old boy was the greatest player I ever saw or hope to see. When I was pitching I had fair success against all the other great hitters, but Cobb was one guy I never could get out. I had a reputation for being a slugger and I guess I could hit 'em pretty far at that, but that guy Cobb could do everything--better than any player I ever saw. Old Georgia Peach was a great hitter, a spectacular fielder, a wonderfui thrower and oh boy, how he could run.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in "Ruth Considers Ty Cobb As Greatest of Players" https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/55058790/ by Joe Reichler (AP), in The Ironwood Daily Globe (August 24, 1945), p. 10

Hope, Guy, Boy, Success

“See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 119 (note 2), in: 'Fumées dans la campagne', Edmond Jaloux

Love, Light

“What is charm, it is not a moral quality.. it is not intellectual for no man by much thinking is able to add a grain of it to his personality. One either has it or has it not, it cannot be acquired or even cultivated. It is not physical even.. it seems to be added to the human personality, an aura, a glow, the gold dust upon a butterfly's wing, the bloom upon a peach.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

February Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Thinking, Personality

“A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.”

Raymond Chandler book The High Window

Source: The High Window (1942), chapter 17

Girl, Clothes

“People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

Love, People, Thinking

“We need a new Mario game where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try to push down that sick feeling in your stomach telling you she's "damaged goods," a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex-negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom, "Do you still love me?"”

Joey Comeau book Overqualified

and you pretend to be asleep. You press A button rhythmically, to control your breath, to keep even.
Letter to Nintendo, pg 40.
Overqualified

Love, Sex, Feeling, Game

“Wanting this landlord's daughter
is wanting the topmost
peach.”

Tsangyang Gyatso, 6th Dalai Lama (1683–1706) sixth Dalai Lama of Tibet

Source: Attributed, Poems of Sadness: The Erotic Verse of the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso tr. Paul Williams 2004, p.37

Daughters

“Here’s a pot with a cot in a park
In a park where the peach-blossoms blew,
Where the lovers eloped in the dark,
Lived, died and were changed into two
Bright birds that eternally flew
Through the boughs of the may, as they sang;
’T is a tale was undoubtedly true
In the reign of the Emperor Hwang.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

Ballades in Blue China (1880)

Lovers, Bird, Change

“I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book Three: Centavos

Way, Feeling, Light, Time

“They got alchemy.
They turn the roses into gold
They turn the lilac into honey
They're making love for the peaches.

And they'll do it,
Do it for you.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Singles and rarities

Love, Making love

“Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Context: It is one thing to know your author-man or woman or gay or black or paraplegic or president. It is another thing to choose only man or woman or et cetera, as the only quality of voice empowered to address you, as the only class of sensibility or experience able to understand you, or that you are able to understand.
How a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads. American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone: "Self-Help" or "Health." There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. The professor of Romance languages at Dresden, a convert to Protestantism, was tortured by the Nazis as a Jew — only that — a Jew. His book, published sixty years after the events it recounts, is shelved in my neighborhood bookstore as "Judaica." There is no shelf for irony.

Books

“And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

NOW interview (2004)
Context: The ripeness was a letter that John Keats wrote to his brother who emigrated to America describing what it was like to have a peach or piece of a peach in his mouth. And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it. Let it go through your palette. Let it lie on your tongue. Let it melt a little bit. Let it run from the corners. It's like describing the most incredible sex orgy. And then, you bite. But, it must be so ripe. It must be so delicious. In other words, you must not waste a second of this deliciousness which for him was life and being a great poet. That you savor every, everything that happened. I want to get ripe.

Reading

“We had to fight the Okies because we were Mexicans! It didn’t matter to them that my brother and I were outcasts on our own turf. They’d have laughed if we’d told them that we were easterners. To them we were greasers, spics and niggers. If you lived on the West Side, across from the tracks, and had brown skin, you were a Mexican. Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 78.

People, World, Fight, Parting

“I grow old … I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

Girl, Thinking, Water, Singing