Bill Holm Quotes

It's odd to see pictures of your parents before your own birth, before your nagging presence altered their lives forever.

After publishing The Age of Reason as an old man, Paine was beaten and turned out of his house and away from his town by his fellow citizens to punish him for blasphemy. I had, even then, a little glimmer of how dangerous it actually is for an American to behave like an American. We've never believed a word we've said from the Bill of Rights onward. What conceivable right to we have to feel smug about the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie by fanatical foreigners? We don't do badly with fatwas ourselves.

Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the aspen tree a month too soon.
No use wind. All you succeed
in doing is making music, the noise
of failure growing beautiful.

How naive and foolish the young are to imagine that they understand the loneliness of great age, the outliving of your contemporaries, anyone to whom your century of memory might make any sense.

Don't whine about your poverty and brainless labor. You can read, can't you? Get thee to a library and foment rebellion - in both inner and outer worlds.

Children judge each other harshly, but don't make nice distinctions among the grown.

You must sit down to speak this language,
It is so heavy you can't be polite or chatter in it.
For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of your life is laid out before you"
-quoted in "The Geography of Bliss

I inherited from my father and still nourish the notion that Republicans are those who have acquired enough money, often by inheritance and blind luck, to entertain the opinion that their fellow citizens should work harder and be more grateful to the moneyed class while they refrain from work themselves and sit in clean rooms with folded soft hands examining their bank statements and brokerage reports.