Quotes from Kathleen Rooney

The worst thing about Farrington's poem is that it presents the vast obscenity that was the Great War as a jolly adventure—but in fact any war story, no matter how unsparing or how true, warns against war only if its audience wants to be warned.

As I walk out, the music on the stereo starts to affect me the way music only does when I've been drinking: I suddenly want to say I love this song to everything that comes on, and I start hearing messages that seem meant just for me.

The last poem I wrote before they sent me in was called "Blackout;" it went like this: When life seems gray And short of fizz It seems that way Because it is.

Extending hospitality to all, even to the most cloddish, truly is the basis of civilization. The fact that the most cloddish, having nothing better to do, always show up and spoil the party for everyone else probably spells civilization's ultimate doom.

I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.

If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.

If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.

Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.

People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For

Whenever "everyone" is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do. I

Here's some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you've made before you look askance at somebody else's.

All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving. ... Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.

My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.

Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs. I

Like many parents in middle age, he's quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.

Time only goes in that one direction.

Friends, no. But I would not waste my exertions cultivating anyone as an enemy.

But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained.

caelum, non animum mutant, for instance—climate may change, but not character—and

Even then I'd begun to think—and to push away the thought—that committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.

We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.

If one knocks oneself out of one's routine—and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs—then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is.

Whenever "everyone" is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do.

The use of the passive voice to disguise one's role in the making of a decision is imprecise and obfuscatory. You're a better adman than that. Active verbs! Why not say 'I refuse to pay you fairly'?