Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page.

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.

Remember that when you say "I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.

And Thames and all the rivers of the kings Ran into Mississippi and were drowned. They planted England with a stubborn trust But the cleft dust was never English dust.

There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.

When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.