My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away – but oh how I sing in my gold cage.
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.
Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.
It’s exhausting. When everything’s a deliberate political stance. Even if it’s interesting.
How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one’s own existence.
Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.
Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone’s primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place.
A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
You are a born storyteller,” said the old lady. “You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one.
The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject’s life...
Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means – and with absolute sincerity – but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems.
She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don’t read the books.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful.
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.