Paper Quotations

Well, I have finished the first draft of my Jeremiah paper. Tomorrow I'll read it over and make any necessary changes, and then hand it in tomorrow night. I feel okay about it, it just took a lot out of me. Here are my two favorite (long) quotations from my paper:

I was on a bus some years ago when a man suddenly spoke up in a loud, pained voice: “You don’t know how I suffer! No one on this bus suffers the way I do!” Somebody in the back called out, “Rent a hall!” Someone else said, “Do you want to borrow my crutches?” and actually produced a pair of crutches and offered them across the aisle. The man tapped his knee and looked out the window with an exasperated expression, as if to say, “I wish there weren’t so many nuts riding busses.” What I would like to find in poetry, as on that bus, is one who could express the pain of everyone. -Galway Kinnell

And what I close the paper with, from Damage, a poem by Wendell Berry:

[Art] accepts the clarification of pain, and concerns itself with healing. It cultivates the scar that is the course of time and nature over damage: the landmark and mindmark that is the notation of a limit.

To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound.

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.