Quotes from Martin Prechtel

When we first meet what we love, we could become poets for our longing. When we are removed from what we love, we become singers of grief and weavers of elegant description.

Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.

I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet. This was the same look people saw in your eyes when you have died for beauty and come to live accepting nature as life with no promise of paradise, and mad at people who couldn't see that.

Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.

The story tells us that living the life of an artist is not as useful as living our lives as a work of art.

Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path?

I've been so lonely, mother, I decided to converse with my belly button, it talks just like my sweetheart but sometimes does not obey. I've seen yours, it really has a big smile; I guess as you get older your navel becomes more expressive.

She was wild, noble, scary, and full of secrets. Unlike her daughter, whose beauty the whole world beamed to behold and be held, the Moon was a forceful queen, both changeable and fierce, and nothing dared defy her will. More feared than loved, she was definitely obeyed.

Other than her daughter, there was no woman more beautiful than the Moon. And besides Old Man Fire, there was no one on earth as old as she. But the Moon was the first of those kind of women for whom age is more a sculptor, carving the young girl's original smoothness into a more complex and deeper beauty.

The fact that commercial culture always panders to the lowest common denominator of awareness and taste should not stop us in our personal revolution to become real human beings.