A Quote by Anne Waldman

I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back.
Margaret had close links with Geneva where she had spent some years as a student while her parents had been wardens of the Quaker Hostel there and where she had gone back as secretary to Gilbert Murray.
Back when I went to Louisiana State University a million years ago, we got the Baton Rouge paper. But if you wanted to read 'The New York Times' or 'The Wall Street Journal,' you had to go to the reading room of the student union, and you got the edition several days after it had been published, and you had to read it on a wooden stick.
As a Fundamentalist I had discovered while I was in college that it is possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about AD 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than did old Ignatius or Clement, who had been taught by the very apostles themselves, just what the Church is and what it should look like.
The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they'd witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.
I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.
My father and I had a good relationship, it was very relaxed. He had a lot of humour. He looked a little bit like me, although he had no beard. He had the appearance of a very elegant British-looking man.
My father was a very warm, gregarious, sociable person who had many interests. He lived his life very much in the present, full of activities and the next project. He had many hobbies. He was not given to retrospection.
I think of my parents as a single unit, and it's interesting because they shared so much, and they were totally opposite. My mother, a Martha Graham dancer, had a classical background; my father had a back-porch background.
I had worked on dogs for a couple of years developing a renal transplant operation. We had dogs running around with kidneys we had transplanted back into themselves.
I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
Some people are born with very little; some are fortunate enough to have it all. When I grew up, we didn't have much. I had to hustle to get what I wanted... but I had that hunger for more. I didn't always make the right choices, but I learned from my mistakes.
My father worked in a factory and as a child it felt very secure. It felt very secure because everybody had work, the schools were free, so there was a security of knowing that the war had finished and families would come together again.
I think that the line between television and features started to blur a couple years ago. The standards started to become the same, which is that the idea had to be very loud. The show didn't have to be loud; the idea had to be loud. It had to cut through the clutter.
My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life.
He had found many years ago before that if you kept very quiet people filled in the silences themselves,offering more information than they had originally intended to give.
If any pale student, glued to his desk, here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruits is that pallid and emasculate scholarship of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.
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