“Protest songs? They can express what folks are already feeling…but they’re maybe not the best way of changing people’s minds…Maybe, I was thinking, songs and music should instead present an alternative path. Maybe songs can make an emotional case for inclusiveness and openness instead of just being critical. Maybe songs can be that possibility, rather than just a rational argument for it.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
After doing this “clip show” gimmick at the end of 2025 and then trying to take quote collecting seriously, I noticed something: my notes app was absolutely goddamned overflowing. I read a lot, and the writers I read are real good, it turns out.
There’s something fun about doing this in April—maybe this blog is a found poem? As I did before, I’ll try to construct it in a way that is compelling to read. Some people said they enjoyed the last one. Hopefully you’ll get something out of reading a few of these a year, ha. Hey, here’s a poetic exercise for the month of April: do this with a bunch of different books, then write a poem around the lines you excerpt. Sort of like Dan Beachy-Quick’s This Nest, Swift Passerine.
One note: as I’m still figuring out the timing here, this will include some quotes from books I read in December 2025. Other than that, this is all stuff I read in the first three months of 2026. Also, if it’s been an epigraph on the blog, it won’t be included here. Unless it’s that good a quote.
An image to separate the intro from the meat of the text and we’re off! Have fun!
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“may I decompose in private wherever I am found dead” – upfromsumdirt, “JFKDLS;A (ORISON TO THE ORISHAS)”
“‘I am about life,’ i said to myself. ‘I’m gonna live as hard as i can until i die. And i’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind, before they are even born.” – Assata Shakur, ‘Assata’
“There is nothing worse, certain painful and deadly diseases notwithstanding, than an unsatisfactory, piss-poor truth, whereas a satisfactory lie is all too easy to accept, even embrace, get cozy with.” – Percival Everett, ‘Telephone’
“The more we read, the more we wrote.” – Assata Shakur, ‘Assata’
“I amused myself with the thought that people often make a point of declaring their uselessness in order to be helpful. I can’t change anything, but I’m here for you.” – Percival Everett, ‘Telephone’
“Much like the sounds of the birds in the dark outside my tent when I am alone near my cave, my story never hushes.” – Percival Everett, ‘Telephone’
“I was grief and sadness walking, but I could not let myself sink into a pit. I had to be strong for my child.” – Percival Everett, ‘Telephone’
“I guess I was simply my animal self, not that an animal would have been so stupid.” – Percival Everett, ‘Telephone’
“can you imagine what bullshit / we’d come up with if we / got to name the constellations / today? // ‘Oh look, you can see Mickey & Minnie / really well tonight, right off to the / east, next to The / Beatles meteor shower.’” – Mitchell Nobis, “The LeBroniverse (Brought To You By Gatorade)”
“[Theodor Adorno] viewed music as an opiate…Adorno saw the jukebox as a machine that drew ‘suckers’ into pubs with the promise of joy and happiness. But, like a drug, instead of bringing real happiness, the music heard on jukeboxes only creates more desire for itself. He might be right, but he might also have been someone who never had a good time at a honky-tonk.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“Also, although she had never been there, she had grown very bored with Galápagos Archipelago. There was such a wealth of films and slides and books and articles about the islands, which she had used over and over in her courses, that she could not imagine any surprise that might await her there.” – Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Galápagos’
“Her heart throbbed, which annoyingly caused her anger to flake away at the edges.” – Lauren Bolger, ‘The Barre Incidents’
“All rock bands have to realize that they can make a transition from being outrageous to being threatening, from being a joke to being an alternative.” – Tony Kinman, quoted in ‘Going Underground: American Punk 1979-1989’
“your children don’t see you when you / lack imagination (and neither does the world)” – upfromsumdirt, “ROSETTA POEM”
“like it or not, / the end / arrives,” – Mitchell Nobis, “Three-Pointer”
“I shatter a pinky toe / and my mouth is full of ballads” – upfromsumdirt, “MEGAMORPHOSIS”
“and the only one / who always wins / is the end.” – Mitchell Nobis, “Three-Pointer”
“Her heart was an engine, overworked.” – Lauren Bolger, ‘The Barre Incidents’
“Not shoulders…The longer she looked, the more she was sure those fuckers were wings.” – Lauren Bolger, ‘The Barre Incidents’
“The grim reality of it all burned sharp in her stomach; petals of acid opened up their colors to her.” – Lauren Bolger, ‘The Barre Incidents’
“She hadn’t even gotten the chance to think about a possible future living together, and now dying together seemed more likely.” – Lauren Bolger, ‘The Barre Incidents’
“astrology. I still / know exactly who I am. / I forgive myself // for it once a day. / Moon, please / I just want to be seen” – Adrian Sobol, “self portrait with new moon”“It’s always refreshing to meet a young person who has a good head on his shoulders and a clear vision of the way the world needs to go. They aren’t always right, but they do make things so very interesting, and frequently better.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The World We Make’
“Ironically, swastikas were a common shock icon among LA punks, but Tony Kinman wearing a hammer and sickle shirt seemed to cause more controversy.” – George Hurchalla, ‘Going Underground: American Punk 1979-1989’
“Led by [Millions of Dead Cops], many of the transplants from Texas took up either residence or rehearsal space in an old Hamm’s Brewery, an abandoned complex that became known as the Vats.” – George Hurchalla, ‘Going Underground: American Punk, 1979-1989
“The Bad Brains wanted to play music with an edge to it that ‘knocks the rich people who have forgotten how to feel,’ in the words of HR. The end result of the house party was a lot of holes kicked in the walls, which a nonplussed HR discovered later.” – George Hurchalla, ‘Going Underground: American Punk, 1979-1989’
“They sit and wait / On crooked curbs / For dirty work / They sit and wait” – Jose Hernandez Diaz, “An Ode to Los Jornaleros”
“For all the talk…things not being the same anymore and everything having gotten too big, the new generation of kids was actually doing a better job of embracing the underground DIY spirit than a lot of the older generation had.” – George Hurchalla, ‘Going Underground: American Punk 1979-1989’
“When gigs were looking a bit sparse in DC, [Bad Brains] hocked their instruments in the fall of ‘79 and headed overseas…British immigration officials were not impressed with the band members sum wealth of 29 cents.” – George Hurchalla, ‘Going Underground: American Punk, 1979-1989’
“It’s not out of control…it’s just wild. Life runs on chaos math. It’s supposed to be varied and hard to predict—and yes, dangerous.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The World We Make’
“Like countless other bands, most hoped to compensate for their musical shortcomings with speed and exuberance.” – George Hurchalla, ‘Going Underground: American Punk, 1979-1989’
“They have built a border: / At the drive-thru window, when they want fast food— / Between a minimum wage and an artificial convenience.” Jose Hernandez Diaz, “The Border”
“If a border patrol agent found the merchandise after seeing all of our equipment, she might deduce that we were crossing the border to perform, to make money—to work, essentially, and to do so without work permits, which is illegal. This is a kind of illegal similar to undocumented Mexicans working and making money in the United States, not that we made that connection at all.” – Michelle Cruz Gonzales, ‘The Spitboy Rule’
“Azul found a turtle on the highway a few days before so we brought it along to try and include in some shots. He turned out to be a great actor.” – Robert Rodriguez, ‘Rebel Without A Crew’
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“I bought a cheap drum set and started madly bashing away…It was one of the great freedoms of punk, that people without the slightest clue about music enthusiastically tried to create it, often with far more interesting results than traditional musicians could have ever come up with. I was not one of those people, however.” – George Hurchalla, ‘Going Underground: American Punk 1979-1989’
“The song was tough, and vulnerable, and it had attitude. It sounded like something totally fresh and new, like the female punk band I had been waiting to hear, waiting to discover for some time, the band that I was now in with Karin, and Paula, and Adrienne, the band that would soon be named after a female-body-centric creation story, a story that didn’t involve god, a rib, or a man.” – Michelle Cruz Gonzales, ‘The Spitboy Rule’
“No witchcraft, no enemy action has silenced / the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. / We the people—we have done it ourselves.” – Carla Sofia Ferreira, “Cento For Rachel Carson: A Fable For Today”
“I wouldn’t call what we did then entertainment, but it was riveting in its own disturbing way.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“I thanked him and decided not to tell him how much I made it for, and how it was put together because in the end that shouldn’t matter. I had a feeling that if people just saw it as a movie, without knowing the sacrifices that had to be made to get it done…I’m impressed that a lot of the things we attempted actually came out, but that’s not what makes a movie great.” – Robert Rodriguez, ‘Rebel Without A Crew’
“Someday I will have a best friend all my own…Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor.” – Sandra Cisneros, ‘The House On Mango Street’
“I had no interest in or ability to learn smooth dance moves, though we all watched Soul Train.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“Don Cornelius saw in Black people a promise beyond their pain, and I was always saddest to come to terms with the idea that he could not outrun his own.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“How showing off is something you do for the world at large and showing out is something you do strictly for your people.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“I told him we can’t pass up the chance of using freaky locations free of charge like this.” – Robert Rodriguez, ‘Rebel Without A Crew’
“We were still a live performing band and not simply a group that faithfully reproduced recordings. We knew that the groove was fun and essential for us, and it visibly moved our audiences.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“Afrofuturism exists as a genre because the white American imagination rarely thought to insert Black people into futuristic settings…” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“AM radio flagged with tin foil, / inch of beef grease in the cast iron. // I don’t remember the words / but the rhythms,” – Joe Wilkins, “The Sorrowful Mysteries”
“It’s no wonder that many came to believe that roughness and inaccuracy were positive values; they came to represent authenticity and a resistance to the commercial steamroller of smoothness.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“I am not concerned about the truth of whether or not Sun Ra ever went to Saturn, because if you can get good enough at convincing people that you are not of this world, or that you are capable of otherworldly things, then that act of convincing can bring you a little closer to self-made utopia.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“The people who think they can never be played are the ones all true performers know to go after.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“On the plane back home from the FUPU show in Los Angeles, I still feel the charge of their music, and their environment making its way through my body. I will tell people that this is what I got into punk music for, though I that is a lie. When I was younger, I got into punk shows because I thought it might help me release all of the anger I held inside me.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“A successful scene presents an alternative.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“Music is social glue—it holds families, nations, cultures, and communities together.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“poetry is the archaeology of awkward science; / it is the removal of the oblongatas/ where the mainstream has metastasized, / hatching its corporate slang / in the sealed sarcophagus that is America.” – upfromsumdirt, “IDALTUS #1 AND #2”
“There is a marker for Hannah Toliver on which they still use the word fugitive and you think connotation matters, word choice matters, you wield them, after all.” – Beth Gilstrap, ‘There Is News Along The Ohio River’
“someone said this place has a faraway sound, like the songs we sung before the church and jesus lashed us down to this moaners’ bench of religion. i say don’t nothing sound more american than angola.” – Tyehimba Jess, “leadbelly in angola prison: down again”
“I have witnessed a Fuck U Pay Us show, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it ever since. Black people shouting because…there is no other volume at which one can say to their people, ‘I want all of us to be free, and I cannot do it alone.’” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“with two months left in my sentence, i twist the 12 screws that line stella’s head so i can howl in double dropped D, the key that lemon always said unlocks the grave’s trapdoor and drags the devil up from his harem to shiver between the strings.” – Tyehimba Jess, “july, 1933: leadbelly receives lomax at angola prison”
“And so I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“Every court is a horror movie setting at its core, where property matters more than human lives and justice is measured in billable hours.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The World We Make’
“I thought a lot about those boys…I hated them, but what i couldn’t understand is why they hated me so much. Everybody was always saying what a dog-eat-dog world it was. There were all kinds of people in the world and most of them seemed unhappy. Everybody seemed to be in their own bag and few seemed to care about anybody else.” – Assata Shakur, ‘Assata’
“At Trayvon Martin’s funeral, his mother, Sybrina Fulton, gently wiped tears from her eyes with a white handkerchief. America praised her for her restraint.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“As much as music sometimes seems to be a force for good, it can be harnessed to swell nationalistic pride and stoke belligerent warmongering, too.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“Consume what you can never become, then kill it before it continues to remind you.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
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“Back then, I thought being rich was the solution to everything.” – Assata Shakur, ‘Assata’
“Once I confused the passage of time with change. It was a careless use of language’s unfreedoms.” – Claudia Rankine, “outstretched”
“Unlike gays in the punk scene who were very private about their sexuality and didn’t come out until later—Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü, for example—the Texas bands were very up front about it…it was really daring of them to take it on the road…For all the vaunted tolerance of the punk scene, homophobia still ran rampant. Still, Gary Floyd remembers how much of a relief Austin was as a gay man in Texas, having come out in Houston.” – George Hurchalla, ‘Going Underground: American Punk 1979-1989’
“If many white men can have what they want, including potential anonymous women of any age they have yet to meet, in a society set up to support them with images of officers and gentlemen and Don Draper, that does not mean, the counselor implied, my husband wouldn’t be devastated by my absence.” – Claudia Rankine, “lemonade”
“History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations in Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are ‘liberals.’ But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull out that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler.” – Assata Shakur, ‘Assata’
“When Hillary Clinton refused to pull out of the 2008 Democratic primary despite no apparent way forward, because as she said “we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated…” she was in fact point to the unspoken reality that President Obama’s achievements did not safeguard him from white terrorism.” – Claudia Rankine, “tiki torches”
“The structures that inform our lives are the predetermined architecture we live in or against. But I am beginning to know that feelings can change structures.” – Claudia Rankine, “lemonade”
“This is how it works, he realizes in wonder. This is what he needs…These total strangers are his allies. Their anger, their need for a return to normalcy, rises from them like heat waves.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The City We Became’
“Chris and the other Indigenous women they’d been hunting with had made Bronca help with the butchery. It was important, they’d told her, to know where her food came from, and to understand that not just one, but many deaths enabled her survival. Therefore it was crucial that she use every party of the animal, as much as she could, and take no more than she needed.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The City We Became’
“So they’ll deny the facts on the ground and make this to be incompetence on my part. You keep asking me why I hate them?” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The City We Became’
“There’s one way to break this stupid cycle and save yourselves before it bites you in the ass, again. Mind your business.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The World We Make’
“City magic is liminal. It likes the hidden stories, the perceptual-conceptual shifts, the space between metaphor and reality.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The World We Make’
“You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.” – Sandra Cisneros, ‘The House On Mango Street’
“His name was Geraldo. And his home is in another country. The ones he left behind are far away, will wonder, shrug, remember. Geraldo—he went north…we never heard from him again.” – Sandra Cisneros, ‘The House On Mango Street’
“True, no part of me has left / my body to walk outside it // except myself / except me” – Chiara Di Lello, “NULLIPAROUS (DEFINITIONS)”
“There is news along the Ohio River: you have come to call her Mama, this water.” – Beth Gilstrap, ‘There Is News Along The Ohio River’
“I killed her, okay. / I killed her just to see myself better. / But what are you doing here, / with your eyes?” – Melissa Lozada-Oliva, ‘Dreaming Of You’
“My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.” – Sandra Cisneros, ‘The House On Mango Street’
“And the thought of the mayor coming to Mango Street makes me laugh out loud.” – Sandra Cisneros, ‘The House On Mango Street’
“I’m sorry about this but I’m not sorry about this. I’m already lighting the candles. I’m drawing a circle in the dirt with salt. I’m taking off my shoes. I’m already feeing the dirt beneath my feet dance.” – Melissa Lozada-Oliva, ‘Dreaming Of You’
“Every bar in Brooklyn smells like the same / type of fries. I have a sense / of humor but it’s / probably a crutch for something deeper. / New York is an inside joke you have to pay for.” – Melissa Lozada-Oliva, ‘Dreaming Of You’
“I didn’t know how to say / I want to feel in my skin // like something more than the best of bad options” – Chiara Di Lello, “WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO SAY IN THE ANN TAYLOR LOFT DRESSING ROOM”
“Most of the time it was like I was kissing a fuzzy version of a girl. But then I looked down and my hand was holding all of these worms. Freaky. Then she was just gone.” – Melissa Lozada-Oliva, ‘Dreaming Of You’
“The way she asked me if I’d ever / thought about the priesthood / and I said all I’m missing is the belief” – Chiara Di Lello, “DEVOTION”
“There is news along the Ohio and today, it’s a beaver doing quiet work on a felled pine to pull her back to the business of living.” – Beth Gilstrap, ‘There Is News Along The Ohio River’
“a tree isn’t only good for making more trees.” – Chiara Di Lello, “NULLIPAROUS (I RESPECTFULLY SUBMIT THAT)”
“Noah, you’ll know this soon: the first firefighters / were your neighbors.” – Chiara Di Lello, “NOAH”
“how they can help save the planet. I need to make / sure they know that recycling at home can’t hurt, / but we’re going to have to crush a lot more than / soda cans to stem the tide. If they remember one” – Chiara Di Lello, “FOOTPRINT”
“It’s mothers with children, absolutely convinced that their stress is absolute. It’s the same look you see on businessmen, terrified they will miss their next meeting.” – Lucy Corin, ‘Everyday Psycho Killers’
“It sounds reasonable. Slippery slopes always do.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The City We Became’
“I go back in my cage and i cry until i vomit. I decide it is time to leave.” – Assata Shakur, ‘Assata’
“I don’t want to go to the moon, but I do want to go to the place where Black dreamers stare at the moon and remark loudly about signs and stars in a summer that feels as endless as those old summers…” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“What good is money and a hefty deal if you’re cursed to live in Hollywood?” – Robert Rodriguez, ‘Rebel Without A Crew’
“But I have yet to see an octopus…which wasn’t entirely content to pass its time on earth as a food gatherer, to shun the experiments with unlimited greed and ambition performed by humankind.” – Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Galápagos’
“I have no real magic to promise any of you. I am praying for the most unspectacular of exits.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘A Little Devil In America’
“I like a good story and I also like staring into the sea—do I have to choose between the two?” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
“I was going to try. Now I was not alone. I had help. I had poets. I did not, apparently, have good sense.” – Percival Everett, ‘Telephone’
Sorry you got an email,
Chris