Quotations

“I’m probably melancholic by nature, but that’s true of most writers, in part because we spend so much time living in our own heads, and mining that life for our work.”
– John Connolly

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
– Walter Benjamin

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”
– Walter Benjamin

“How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”
– Walter Benjamin

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
– Walter Benjamin

“Why let the stricken deer go weep
The heart ungalled play
For some must watch
While some must weep
So runs the world away.”
– William Shakespeare

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
-Juan Ramon Jimenez

“Poetry comes from a well that is deeper than time”
– Robert Duncan

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold that no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it is. Is there any other way?”
– Emily Dickinson

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
– Robert Frost

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters comared to what lies within us.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
– Henry James

“A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.”
– James Baldwin

“A wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”
– Thomas Wolfe

“we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset”
– Allen Ginsberg