The days are in order, the months, the seasons, the years. But the weeks are work. They have no names; they repeat.

Beware of speaking of The Rich as if they were someone else

I need someone above me—the Committee, the Law, Money, Time—to be able to say No. Sad my lack of integrity, though I suppose it would be sadder to need them to say Yes.

We've learned to wonder which neutralizes truth more effectively, the tyranny's censorship or the democracy's ten thousand media outlets. In the former truth is too costly, in the latter there's no market for it. In Freud the facts get around the censor in the metaphors of dreams, in Shelley we live in a dream of overfamiliarity and dead metaphor that only the poet can revivify. Does repetition emphasize or hypnotize? Which is clearer, what we see or what we don't see? Are we new or old? Do we love hate or hate love?

Selfsufficiency clings...to itself.

Too much apology doubles the offense

Few plans survive their first success, which suggests they were less about their goals than about the possibility of a little success.

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

How proud we are of our multitasking. What is Life but something to get off our desks, cross off our lists?

The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.

As I thumbed through my copy of The Best American Poetry 2011, I rediscovered James Richardson's Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays from Vectors 3.0.     

Our best-seller. The best bathroom book ever for serious readers.

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James Richardson is one of the finest poets now writing, and the best contemporary practitioner of the art of aphorism."--Publishers Weekly "Not since the appearance of W. S. Merwin's translations and adaptations of aphorisms inAsian Figures, some thirty years ago, has an American poet managed to put down so much delightful and compelling wisdom."--American Literary Review "No one theme or moral pervades these tesserae of specificity. Rather, Richardson's elegant compression invites the reader to fill in the blanks with personal experience... Richardson's knack for the quintessential, sustained for more than a hundred pages, left me satisfied yet hungry for more."--Times Literary Supplement "Readers will be obsessed by this book; they will memorize passages, give copies to friends, proselytize. That's becauseVectors so generously provides the best that poetry can offer. It is a masterpiece of practicality, beauty, and solace."--Boston Review "James Richardson'sVectors... penetrates to the very heart of human nature. I stand looking in the mirror, alert to my own foibles, shaking my head as I tolerate what I know he knows about who I am."--The Georgia Review "Almost every entry... introduces a new insight, provides a revelation, supplies a surprise... it is a book one wants to spend time with, a wonderfully friendly book, generous, witty and entertaining."--Gulf Coast "Vectors is the kind of book you read, reread, thumb through, and pick up several extra copies because you want to share the joy you found in perusing it with friends."--Barrow Street "James Richardson'sVectors is a book of subversive wonders. Stunningly precise, these brilliant aphorisms and ten-second essays show a mind assessing, reassessing, discovering, and interrogating assumptions in ways that feel diamond-sharp, at once good-natured, quietly sly at times, and always, always, very shrewd. 'It can never be satisfied, the mind, never,' wrote Wallace Stevens.Vectors is a remarkable testament to such questing, vivid minding, as these aphorisms alight on everything from the nature of perception, to God, success, fear, shame, self-consciousness, love and friendship."--Laurie Sheck

JAMES RICHARDS

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