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.
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
An odd phrase, “by heart,” he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
You know, it’s a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child’s surprise at the world.