The origin of Art: every night of sleep is the same, every night of insomnia is different.

caco-metonymy: using not-quite the right word, on purpose; a dissonance

"You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty. ...But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty." --G. M. Hopkins

snally - greedy for solitude

paxwax - defensive contempt

"The argument of mine afflicted stile..." --Spenser

"In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame." --E. A. Robinson

Best Titles. A Streetcar Named Desire. Until the Sun Dies. Of a Fire on the Moon. The Romance of Orthodoxy. Gravity's Rainbow. The Small Needle of Doctor Large. Habitation of Dragons. Purple Violet Squish. Ascent into Hell. The Dreadful Lemon Sky. For My Great Folly. Nightspawn. Atlas Shrugged. Apostle in a Top Hat. Dorp Dead.

"So alike are the peaks, the forests, and the villages of Nepal to the fantastic landscapes of Tolkien, so common are the characters that resemble the cast of their stories...that many travellers, without apparent validation, believe that Tolkien had once lived there, especially at a forest place called Glorapani, when he conceived those remarkable stories." --David Zurick, Errant Journeys (1995)

Lives lived in a dimness of mosquitos. They don't even have a word for "mosquito".

"What holy cities are to nomadic tribes--a symbol of race and a bond of union--great books are to the wandering souls of men; they are the Meccas of the mind. Homer was to Greece another Delphi." --G. E. Woodberry

Best Titles. The Way of All Flesh. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Too Far to Walk. From Here to Eternity. Darkness at Noon. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To Kill a Mockingbird. Call It Sleep. Nausea. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Mother Night. The Color Purple. This Island Earth.

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries." --Roethke

As if all the ways to be broken were an alphabet, we hearken only to what could be stories written in it. --Incomprehensible to those who come after. We thought we were saying something important, but all of it is destined to be lost. To write, now, with that awareness.

Best Titles. Faith, Keep the Baby. Christ's Witchdoctor. Nightwood. The Book of the It. The Cat Who Sniffed Glue. Death of a Ghost. The Sun is My Undoing. Smilla's Sense of Snow. I, the Jury. Dieting Makes You Fat. The Dark Light Years. The Ticket that Exploded. The Anathemata. Till We Have Faces. You Shall Know Them. Something Wicked This Way Comes. The History of Luminous Motion. Lithium for Medea. Les Fleurs du Mal. All the Colors of Darkness. Shadow of the Moon. In the Storm of the Eye. Mission of Gravity. Gone with the Wind. The Satanic Verses.

"It may be said that in round numbers, the verse of about five hundred people appears yearly in American magazines--thousands send in manuscripts, only to have them returned; the number may be anywhere from twenty thousand to fifty thousand. About two hundred volumes of verse appear in the course of a year, but publishers say that not one-quarter of them are profitable; perhaps one-eighth, twenty-five, are bought by quite a number of people, that is, there are twenty-five poets in our population whom people really want to read. Let us consider that one person in five thousand is sending verse to magazines, one in 250,000 gets it printed, one in 600,000 issues a book of poems, and one in five million is a real poet." --William Ellsworth, in: 5000 New Answers to Questions (1933) [At this time the U.S. population was about half what it is today.]