What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don’t read the books.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side… He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful.
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.
Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It’s very agreeable once you get used to it.
I’m more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they’re not.
I’m not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
…words have been all my life, all my life–this need is like the Spider’s need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out–the silk is her life, her home, her safety–her food and drink too–and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
I think vestigially there’s a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they’re doing what they’re doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech – but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody’s sun, the world’s sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
An odd phrase, “by heart,” he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
