"Here Dead We Lie

Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young."

-- A. E. Housman


"Gold of all other is a most delicious object, a sweet
light, a goodly lustre it hath; and, saith Austin, we
had rather see it than the Sun." --Robert Burton, The
Anatomy of Melancholy (1628)

"There is a crack in everything God has made..." --Emerson

"In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness
takes the place of imagination." --Wallace Stevens, "Adagia"

"All of Eliot's subsequent poems were written by J. Alfred
Prufrock." --Milton Acorn

You got to study for years to be a doctor or a lawyer or an
engineer, and have licenses & degrees and stuff, but for
the most important jobs, there are absolutely no formal
qualifications: nobody is too stupid to be entrusted with
running a government or raising a baby.

"The outward form of the inward grace of the Romantic
imagination was the French Revolution, and the Revolution
failed." --Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (1961)

"There are stones like souls." --Rabbi Nachman

"I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and
fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night's labours
should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon
them." --letters of Keats 10-27-1818

If we are ever to prevail, it won't be because of our righteous
feelings, or delicate sensibilities, or correct views, or even the
taste for freedom. It can only be because we outthink those
who are committed to destruction.
   --Put that in an anthem.--

"...the Inquisition--an office more adopted to confirm than to
refute the belief of an evil principle." --Gibbon

"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." --Tom
Stoppard, Jumpers