So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.--Elizabeth Bishop, "Insomnia"
and in the brief moment that is today
wild hope this dreamer jars
for I have heard in whispers talk
of life on other stars.--Audre Lorde
Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind
With all thy charms, although this corporeal rind
Thou hast immanacl'd.--Milton, Comus
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud.
--James Baldwin
Anyone can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
--Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist, by Oscar Wilde, 1890
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.--Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, (V.i.4-17)
He took to reading as another man might have taken to drink or to drugs.
--Tennessee Williams, "Something by Tolstoy"
There is New York City, and there is the rest of the world.
--ad for The New York Times, 1992
My memory is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer.
--Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (?)
Giles probably sat in math class, thinking, "There should be more math here--this could be mathier."
--Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 11/97
I hear Year 8 is fudge.
--Andy, on Late Night with Conan O'Brian, on wedding anniversaries.
I use [dashes] all the time--partly because I've gotten tired of all the other punctuation marks.
--Wini Wood, Director of the Writing Program at Wellesley College, 4/9/97
HOME