#poe

I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your life Was a liner I voyaged in. Costly education had fitted you out. Financiers and committees and consultants Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish. You trembled with the new life of those engines. That first morning, Before your first class at College, you sat there Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not, What eyes waited at the back of the class To check your first professional performance Against their expectations. What assessors Waited to see you justify the cost And redeem their gamble. What a furnace Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched The strange dummy stiffness, the misery, Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly Half-approximation to your idea Of the properties you hoped to ease into, And your horror in it. And the tanned Almost green undertinge of your face Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited Head pathetically tiny. You waited, Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers Of the life that judges you, and I saw The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound Which was all you had for courage. I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped, Were terrors that killed you once already. Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely Girl who was going to die. That blue suit. A mad, execution uniform, Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled, Unable to fathom what stilled you As I looked at you, as I am stilled Permanently now, permanently Bending so briefly at your open coffin. ↗

— Ted Hughes

#poetry-quotes #the-blue-flannel-suit #courage

There Are No Believers in This World: There Are Only the Make Believers and the Non-Believers. ↗

— Sharon Esther Lampert

#philosopher #poet #education

People differ to such a degree they agree on nothing, Except death that is, and even on that they disagree. Some say the soul goes on after the death of the body While others claim the soul, with the body, dies too. ↗

— Mutannabi

#education #news #death

Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is just a necessary olf bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about him--except instructors and their hapless students. ↗

— Henry Blake Fuller

#educational-system #poets #education

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dignity #double-standards #empowerment #equality #feminism

Some people like me, some don't. I don't understand, Where the difference comes from. My heart like them all. For a simple childish reason. We all are created equal, we all are humans. ↗

— Santosh Kalwar

#life #love #poems #equality

Take the blinders from your vision take the padding from your ears and confess you've heard me crying and admit you've seen my tears. ↗

— Maya Angelou

#poetry-quotes #equality

Flutter like a hummingbird, Dive like an eagle, Ain't no bird that's my equal. - Twilight ↗

— Kathryn Lasky

#equality

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#poetic #poetry #prose #writers #equality

Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding. ↗

— Langston Hughes

#poetry #seeking #walt-whitman #equality