"This is what the great voice does for us. It rarely astonishes our ears. It illumines our souls, as you see the lightning make the unintelligible craving darkness leap into long mountain ridges, and twisting vales, and spires of cities, and inner recesses of light within light, rose-like, toward a central core of violet heat." --George Meredith, Vittoria

Despair is a concrete-eating termite.

"...I have loved airs that die
Before their charm is writ
Along a liquid sky
Trembling to welcome it." --Robert Bridges

"A discouraging number of reputable poets are sane beyond recall." --E B White

It makes no more sense to want to become one's work than to want to turn into a doorknob.

Art eludes the artist as much as the critic.

'My flesh is combustible and my conscience dark;
my passions ephemeral and sharp, glitter
like the shards of bottle glass that bristled
on the henyard wall to keep out cats and thieves.' --Ramón López Velarde, quoted in: Octavio Paz, The Siren and the Seashell, tr L Kemp & M S Peden (1976)

"It might be difficult to form an interspecies republic." --Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe

"Tennyson read Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, and thought him 'a kind of moralist,' though his subjects, he allowed, are shocking." --William Allingham in: Tennyson, Interviews & Recollections (1983)

"Kipling's death in 1936 coincided with King George V's. There was another less noticed death at the time--that of Saklatvala, an Indian Parsee who had become the Communist MP for Battersea. It so happened that Kipling's cremation followed Saklatvala's, and at the crematorium there was no time to clear away the Red Flag and other communist insignia set up for Saklatvala. Truly God is not mocked." --Malcolm Muggeridge, Things Past: An Anthology (1978)

'I write down
the ideograms for "youth"
feeling uneasy
about the preponderance
of horizontal striokes.' --Tawara Machi, Salad Anniversary

Dreamed i was in my parents' old house, & a helicopter crashed into the house behind us. When i called the fire department, i got an answering machine. So i left a message & went back to what i was doing.