The Bottom Line
By Mike Garofalo
"Caress the detail, the divine detail."
- Vladimir Nabokov
"The idea of one overbearing truth is exhausted."
- Thomas Mann
“A profound attention to the details of this world.”
- George Levine
“We think in generalities, but we live in details.”
- W. H. Auden
“Cherish the minutes heureuses.”
- Charles Baudelaire
“The vast and unsuspected reality of small things"
- Robert Nozick
“We are better satisfied in particulars.”
- Wallace Stevens
"God is in the details."
- Mies Van Der Rohe
“Details are all there are.”
- Maezumi Roshi
“Focus on small worlds of order.”
- Paul Valery
"In general, be more specific."
- Mike Garofalo
“No ideas but in things."
- William Carlos Williams
"The natural object is always
the adequate symbol."
- Ezra Pound
"Details are the Life of Prose."
- Jack Kerouac
"Only emotion objectified endures."
- Louis Zukofsky
"holy shit!"
- woo who
"marvelous miniscule particulars"
- Mike Garofalo
"Tell him of things:
Tendernesss towards Existence.
Sacramentalized Experience.
Mystically Physical."
- Galway Kinnell
"I love the common things.
Everyday things are lovely to me."
- Philip Larkin
"To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened
By the ten thousand things."
- Soto Buddhist Master Dogen
"The kinds of thing are more important
than the Individual thing, though
the specific is supremely Interesting.
Right?"
- John Ashbery
"The object of our lives is to look at,
listen to, touch, taste things. Without
them, these sticks, stones, feathers,
shells; there is no Deity."
- Reginald H. Blyth
"quotidian familiars versified"
- Mike Garofalo
"Respect for things as they are."
- Fairfield Porter
"When we look for things there is
nothing but mind, and when we look
for mind there is nothing but things."
- Alan Watts
"True poets ... bring people back from
their present strayings and sickly
abstractions, to the costless, average,
divine, original concrete."
- Walt Whitman
"Treat the small as great
and the few as many."
- Lao Tzu
"The Littlest Things: old, worn,
impermanent, imperfect—
wabi-sabi style."
- Mike Garofalo
"Give me a for instance.
Show don't just Tell."
- Vernacular Expressions
"She put a skin on everything
she said."
- William B. Yeats
"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
- William Blake
References for this Collage of Quotations:
1. Mind Writing Slogans, Part II,
Path: (Method
or Recognition)
by Allen Ginsberg, 1993
2. The Age of Atheists
by Peter Watson
3. Taking Care of the Details
by Mike Garofalo, 2013
4. A Little History of Poetrty
by John Carey
5. The Spirit of Gardening
by Mike Garofalo, 2000
6. Belief and Techniques
for Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac, 1952
Poetry by Mike Garofalo: Online
25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works
At the Edges of the West
Highway 101 and Hwy 1: Pacific Coast
Cuttings: Haiku, Senryu, Brief Poems
Bundled Up: Quintains and Tankas
At the Edges of the Fertile West
Highway 99 and Interstate 5
Mike Garofalo lives in Vancouver,
Washington. He worked for 50 years
in city and county
public
libraries,
and in elementary
schools. His degrees
are in philosophy,
library science, and
education. He has been a web publisher
since 1998.
25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works
This document was last edited, revised,
reformatted, added to, relinked,
changed, improved, or modified
by Mike Garofalo
on March 6, 2025.