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Quote by Richard L. Ratliff

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Richard L. Ratliff

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“What these books and their like have done for me is tap into some roaming tendency of the mind; I know that I could never have done what these writers have done, been where they have been, pursued the interests they have pursued, but I want to know what it is like. We go to fiction to extend experience, to get beyond our own, For me, this kind of non-fiction writer is furnishing the same need--taking me out of my own comfortable expectations and showing me how it might be elsewhere. Armchair travel? Not quite. I have never believed that travel broadens the mind, having known some well-travelled minds that were nicely atrophied. Rather, these are books--experiences--that encourage a leap of the imagination.”

“In the end, I'm not interested in that which I fully understand. The words I have written over the years are just a veneer. There are truths that lie beneath the surface of the words... truths that rise up without warning, like the humps of a sea monster and then disappear. What performance and song is to me is finding a way to tempt the monster to the surface, to create a space, where the creature can break through what is real and what is known to us. This shimmering space, where imagination and reality intersect... this is where all love and tears and joy exist. This is the place. This is where we live.”

“When you explain an art to someone, you destroy an imagination that was about to catapult in them, and you destroy a place which they were about to build in their mind. Let them see it through their heart without the bounds of time. Through many memories of their life and through the heart, mind, and eyes of their loved ones. Through a mind, that break the constraints of all their thoughts and through the pain, lies, and happiness that they hide inside them. Let them open their wings and get into the portals, which will take each one of them to very different places from the one that you exist.”

“Make Believe When I wake up in the morning Not all is what it seems I drift through a world of make believe Between my real life and my dreams. Strange Adventures from the space book That I read the night before Crowd in upon on my drowsiness Through imagination's door. Between sleeping and waking The alarm clock's jangalang cry Becomes the roaring fire-railed rocket That hurls me through the sky. My bed's a silver spacecraft Which I pilot all alone Whisp'ring through endless stratospheres Towards planets still unknown. Outside through the mists of morning The spinning lights of cars In my make-believe space voyage Become eternities of stars. Is that my mother calling something That my dreams can't understand? Or can it be crackling instructions From far off Mission Command? Gareth Owen”