If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
LEAR: Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal? [Lear strikes him.]
OSWALD: I’ll not be strucken, my lord.
KENT [tripping him]: Nor tripped neither, you base football player?
—William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, Scene iv
My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain. … I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing—I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm—I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.
That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt’s portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind, 2004
The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an orchard. … You pick them up from under your feet but to bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of strange-colored pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you notice their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gayety, they seem to ask to be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe.
—Henry James, “New England: An Autumn Impression,” The American Scene, 1907
In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking always going on. … There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well.
—Sherwood Anderson, Many Marriages, 1923
Kestrel in ma chest: wheesht yersel—
you belang here, amang th gorse n heather.
Lat thaim ramble thair een ower you—
yer broun body stravaigin th glen isnae an unnatural sicht.
Ignor thair conflummixt n scunnert physogs—
thay cannae sense th braken brainches wi’in you.
—Jeda Pearl, “Highland Daunder,” Time Cleaves Itself, 2024
Coming down the stairs, I saw at a glance that something was wrong. There were too many people on the platform, and this always means a delay in the trains. … [I] heard a voice speaking over the public address system, so low that it was like a thought in my mind, this beautiful sentence: “There is no power in all the subway.” The only thing I can put beside it, for poetry, is something I once read in the New York Times: “All Thrace Is Lost.” (In huge headlines, during the war.)
—William Maxwell, letter to Sylvia Townsend Warner, November 17, 1965, describing the blackout affecting New York City
It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.
—Ernest Hemingway, “In Another Country,” 1927
September’s sweet dust gathered
on the windowsill and lizards
hid in the bends of walls.
I’ve taken long walks,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
—Adam Zagajewski, “Transformation” (tr. Clare Cavanagh), Mysticism for Beginners: Poems, 1997
In one small region—less than 1 percent of the human body—the neck concentrates both the vitality and the vulnerability of the human condition. … Construction is gloriously quirky and seemingly improvised. … An odd conglomeration of parts all jammed together in a tight space.
—Kent Dunlap, The Neck: A Natural and Cultural History, 2025
The mirror is so far corrupted that it is rashed with gray, iridescent in parts, and in all its reflections a deeply sad thin zinc-to-platinum, giving to its framings an almost incalculably ancient, sweet, frail, and piteous beauty, such as may be seen in tintypes of family groups among studio furnishings or heard in nearly exhausted jazz records made by very young, insane, devout men who were soon to destroy themselves, in New Orleans, in the early nineteen twenties.
—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
—Thomas Hardy, “The Voice,” 1912
Sergeant Funasaka Hiroshi, stuck in a cave on the island of Palau, observed the American camp below him. “I could imagine the Americans sleeping soundly inside those tents … And in the morning, they’d rise leisurely, shave, eat a hearty breakfast, then come after us again as usual. That sea of shining electric lights was a powerful, silent commentary on their ‘battle of abundance’ … I had an image of the island divided in half with heaven and hell lying next to each other, separated by only a few hundred metres.”
—Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, 2012
Death to all modifiers.
—Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961
Turpmtine Plantation! Twenty-nine thousand acres of prime southwest Georgia forest, fields, and swamp! And all of it, every square inch of it, every beast that moved on it, all fifty-nine horses, all twenty-two mules, all forty dogs, all thirty-six buildings that stood upon it, plus a mile-long asphalt landing strip, complete with jet-fuel pumps and a hangar—all of it was his … to do with as he chose, which was: to shoot quail.
—Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full, 1998
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
—George Bernard Shaw, Immaturity, 1879
