just say it already...

What Dick lacks in academic and scholarly rigor, he more than makes up for in powers of imagination and rich lateral, cumulative association. If he had known more, it might have led him to produce less interesting chains of ideas.

—Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 1 - NYTimes.com

The Situation

Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won’t see.
And life goes on.

—Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

—The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. - Slate Magazine

Happenings

You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t happen.

It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t—
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone’s so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story’s there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven’t happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened.
It’s going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

—The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. - Slate Magazine

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

—The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. - Slate Magazine

And in many ways you could say that the poet´s path is to be able to assign names to things which are large enough to leave them alive and movable, so that the name doesn´t kill off what you´re describing. So that it can, if effective, announce its own name to you.

—The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE THIRTY-EIGHT: Feb-Mar (07) > Interviews >Interview with David Whyte

I get paid all day, every day,” he said — “which is almost too much for a sensitive artist.

—How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre - NYTimes.com

Far from being absurd, the idea that the Constitution is a living organism follows from the fact that the words used in writing the Constitution are underdetermined and dynamic and thus “living organisms” in the metaphorical sense in play here. In this respect there is nothing unique about the Constitution. It is a dynamic object because of the simple reason that word meanings are dynamic. Every written document — indeed every word written or uttered — is a living organism.

—The Living Word - NYTimes.com

Imagine if suffering were real.
Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.
What if the midget or the girl with one arm
really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.

—‘Collected Poems’ by Jack Gilbert - NYTimes.com

My coach explained, though, that if I wasn’t falling at least once a day in training, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Indeed, to improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Body builders call it the “pain period.” Only by trying something new, struggling, learning, and then trying again do we improve our performance. It’s a simple matter of acclimating to unchartered territory.

—The 40-30-30 Rule: Why Risk Is Worth It :: Tips :: The 99 Percent

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

—6 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck - Maria Popova - Entertainment - The Atlantic