Author Quotes

My grandfather was the great solace. He didn't have a lot of formal education, but he had a feeling for words and a sense of the past, a sense of being involved in something larger than his own immediate concerns.

I have so fiercely dreamed of you And walked so far and spoken of you so, Loved a shade of you so hard That now I've no more left of you.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Art is a misleading, deceptive superstition; in it we think that we have before us the last, innermost essence of humanity itself; and yet, it merely foists upon us a beautiful product of man, in which are set down all of the egotistical, self-satisfying thoughts and emotions which remain sterile and ineffective in the world of action. And I, imbecile, esteem this product more highly than the human being himself, whom God has created.

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder

An hypothesis is only a habit - a habit of looking through a glass of one peculiar colour, which imparts its hue to all around it.

Frederick Marryat

You must not allow yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded

Minnie Maddern Fiske

In the mind all things are written in pictures - there is no alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures and symbols.

Richard Jefferies

My plan is to ignore this ageing business and hope it goes away. But if these bags under my eyes get any bigger, Ryanair will make me pay extra for them.

John O'Farrell (author)

It was popularly supposed that figures couldn't lie, but they did; they lied like the dickens.

Mary Stewart Cutting

He called for his urinal and having made water in it, he cast it, & viewed it (as Physicians do) a prettie while; at last he swore soberly, he saw nothing in that man's water, but that he might live.

John Harington (writer)

Someone had tried to warn me of the kind of catastrophe that is likely to occur when you involve yourself too closely in one of those destinies that is ringed around by the transient tinsel of human applause.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

This piercing cold I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom
under my heel...

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

J. D. McClatchy

I need to feel that the language in my poems is alive, in the sense of talking on the phone to a friend sharing gossip.

Deborah Garrison

That's really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous. Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists.

Robert Olen Butler

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

Summertime
And the livin' is easy,
Fish are jumpin',
And the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy's rich,
And your ma is good lookin';
So hush, little baby,
Don' yo' cry.

Old and ruined, all rotted and broken up These plum trees function gorgeously A few days every year In a way nobody else does.

My idea of marriage, as of every other partnership,... is that each member shall contribute to it his or her personality, unrepressed and uncoerced. Thus, and only thus, we obtain the most complex synthesis possible, which may well surpass in beauty, as it surely does in interest and human value, the separate elements of such an association.

Phyllis Bentley

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

My boyhood saw
Greek islands floating over Harvard Square.

There are deep lines on each side of his mouth and I know they are the scars from the thin blade of life.

Deborah Joy Corey

There is no medicine to be found for a life which has fled.