This page is for some quotes, poems, song lyrics that are meaningful to me.

TEDDY ROOSEVELT, “THE MAN IN THE ARENA”

I think in some fashion this has been with me since I first came across on the back of meal ticket card at Brown University when I visited there to play a football game during college. I was taken by it then, and carried it around in my wallet for years. I believed at the time, as a very young and energetic young man, that this was how I wanted to approach my life.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

WILLIAM FAULKNER, NOBEL PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

I first became aware of this one when I was at NYU Graduate film school. It inspired me greatly, capturing what Faulkner calls the “agony and the sweat” of the creative artist seeking self expression.

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

ITHAKA — BY MICHAEL D. SELLERS
Well, if you’re still with me, you must be digging pretty deeply so here we go – this is a song I wrote, inspired by my study of Ancient Greek language and the poems of Constantin Kavafis in college. I wrote this at the age of 22 and it has never gotten old for me. This is me:

On the day you start your journey/Pray that the way is long/Full of hopes, full of dreams/In the cool grey light of dawn//Take a look around you/Let your spirit set you free/Let your mind hold the standard/Upon your Odyssey//And pray that the way is long/That the summer mornings last/That the candles of your future/Gently melt into your past

Mother of pearl/Amber and ebony/Many are the treasures/That are there for you to see//Always keep before you/The island as your goal/Ithaka awaits you/And as you’re growing old//Hold on to your journey/Let is last until you’re grey/Let the see run smooth below you/As it sends you on your way

And though you find the island poor/The knowledge that you’ve gained/Says that you belong to her/Though somehow you’ve both changed//Now you’ve come to understand/Just what the island means/It was she who sent you on your way/And answered all your dreams//So look back on your journey/Think of everywhere you’ve been/Thank her for your wisdom/Know you do it all again.

And pray that the way is long/That the summer mornings last/That the candles of your future/Gently melt into your past