The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.
Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn’t.
In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.
If we had the true and complete history of one man – which would be the history of his head – we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, the vanities, the diminution of intelligence, the endless trivia we’d encounter, the ever present dust.
Try to remember that artists in these catastrophic times, along with the serious scientists, are the only salvation for us, if there is to be any.
I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.
Happiness is just a priest who reads us words of consolation while we walk up the steps to the hangman.
Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one’s mother into words... It may have been easier to put her in her grave.
The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.
So–in short–color is consciousness itself, color is feeling, and shape is the distance color goes securely, as in our life we extend ourselves through neighborhoods and hunting grounds; while form in its turn is the relation of these inhabited spaces, in or out or up or down, and thrives on the difference between kitchen and pantry. This difference, with all its sameness, is yet another quality, alive in time like the stickiness of honey or the gently rough lap of a cat, for color is connection.
There are few poets today who can equal, in their esthetic exploitation of language, in their depth of commitment to their medium, in their range of conceptual understanding, in the purity of their closed forms, the work of Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Broch, Gaddis, or Calvino, or any of half-a-dozen extraordinarily gifted South Americans.
SAY IT. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one.
And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha – none of the things you’d loved.
I’d like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.
Wills aren’t really strong or weak; it is the characters that they express and serve that are.
The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue.
But they say that sexuality can be dangerously Dionysian. Nowhere do we need order more than at any orgy.
This Midwest. A dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; our outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time, as Alice both changed and remained in her story.
The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.
Her world must be flat because she disappeared all at once rather than a bit at a time.