Albert Goldbarth QUOTES

1 " Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down. "

― Albert Goldbarth

2 " Talk to me. I'll believe anything. "

― Albert Goldbarth

3 " ... I slipped our wicker bed and walked the sands
where we were also roughly repeated: some young couple,
"you did," "I didn't," "you sure the fuck did" – they hugged
that bicker to their chests like blankets fighting cold. "

― Albert Goldbarth

4 " then
"love," or "falling in love," an extra density
textured into the weave of the days, a craziness,
an orchidaceous interdimensional blossoming of the otherwise
linear creatures we were. "

― Albert Goldbarth , Marriage And Other Science Fiction

5 " I think it's the future. At least, it's the future
we called "tomorrow." Here it is,
"today": one hundred cups of effort,
good intentions, small misunderstandings,
stretching away from the bed
and finally leading back to it. "

― Albert Goldbarth , The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007

6 " How many hands were shook and names were signed
and pipes were passed congenially in a circle,
before the first of the used-car dealerships rose up
on the ground where the gods had walked? "

― Albert Goldbarth , Everyday People

7 " And each of the train's hundred windows
had a face. Passing quickly, it
became a strip of film

so worked as film does: one
continuous story formed, The Man
of A Hundred Faces. I ran

alongside, so slow (that trick of perception)
I ran backwards. Finally,
I was a child. I looked up in the movie

theater I went to each Saturday afternoon,
the screen like a window, and waved
to the figure there, an old man

at the station just as we pulled away."

- The Story "

― Albert Goldbarth

8 " If your life depended on coming up with a tally,

if you could straighten its numbers into a flexible line

around the moon and back a dozen times,

a hundred … still you couldn’t count the planets

that cohabit this planet. "

― Albert Goldbarth , Everyday People

9 " you don’t understand

the protoknowledge we’re born with, coded into our cells:

soon soon soon enough we die. Even before we’ve seen

the breast, we’re crying to the world that we want;

and the world doles out its milkiness in doses. We

want, we want, we want, and if we don’t then

that’s what we want: abstemiousness is only

hunger translated into another language. Yes

there’s pain and and heartsore rue and suffering, but

there’s no such thing as “anti-pleasure”: it’s pleaure

that the anchorite takes in his bleak cave

and Thoreau in his bean rows and cabin. For Thoreau,

the Zen is: wanting less is wanting more.

Of less. "

― Albert Goldbarth , Everyday People