Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster.
—Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, 1975
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.
—John Donne, “Love’s Growth,” Poems, 1633
The form of the first flowering plants is unknown; there are various tentative, delicate candidates. To picture a fairly early flower, though, one can, perhaps surprisingly, picture a magnolia—a rather exuberant early effort, as if celebratory of the new way of living. Grasses, birches, and other more restrained forms came later, along with those geniuses of unrestraint, orchids.
—Peter Godfrey-Smith, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World, 2024
A thought-murder a day keeps the doctor away.
—Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear, 1948
The trickle cutting from the hill-crown …
I see the whole huge hill in the small pool’s stomach.
This will be serious for the hill.
It suspects nothing.
Crammed with darkness, the dull, trusting giant
Leans, as over a crystal, over the water
Where his future is forming.
—Ted Hughes, “Sugar-Loaf,” The Atlantic, May 1962
Historians usually find what they are looking for—a fact that makes me uneasy.
—Morton Smith, in Carlo Ginzburg, “Witches and Shamans,” New Left Review, July/August 1993
He would twist a sheet of paper beneath a pair of scissors and out would drop an elephant, a stag, or a monkey with trunks, horns and tails delicately and exactly formed. Or, taking a pencil, he would draw beast after beast—an art that he practised almost unconsciously as he read, so that the fly-leaves of his books swarm with owls and donkeys as if to illustrate the “Oh, you ass!” or “Conceited dunce” that he was wont to scribble impatiently in the margin.
—Virginia Woolf, “My Father: Leslie Stephen,” The Atlantic, March 1950
I have a grocer’s assistant’s mind.
—James Joyce (Letters of James Joyce, Vol. III, Richard Ellmann, ed.)
The compulsive pessimist’s last defense—stay still enough and the blade of the scythe, somehow, will pass by—Sloth is our background radiation, our easy-listening station. …
It has only retreated from its long-familiar venue, television, and is seeking other, more shadowy environments—who knows? computer games, cult religions, obscure trading floors in faraway cities—ready to pop up again in some new form to offer us cosmic despair on the cheap.
—Thomas Pynchon, “The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” The New York Times, June 6, 1993
What am I doing inside this old man’s body?
I feel like I’m the insides of a lobster …
my waving claws
Inconsequential, wavering, and my feelers
Preternatural, trembling, with their amazing
Troubling sensitivity to threat;
And I’m aware of and embarrassed by my ways
Of getting around, and my protective shell.
Where is it that she I loved has gone to, as
This cold sea water’s washing over my back?
—David Ferry, “Soul,” Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, 2012
There is a—let us say—a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider—but it goes on knitting. … The infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. …
It knits us in and knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions—and nothing matters.
—Joseph Conrad, letter to Robert Cunninghame Graham, 1897
I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 1947
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
—Philip Larkin, “The Trees,” Collected Poems, 1993
Tell me where it hurts, baby.
There’s a URL for that. There’s a 12-step meeting two blocks
from you, here’s a hotline, here’s a Gaelic love ballad. Let’s talk sharks,
the number of bones in a peafowl, which gender is more likely to
die underground …
I’m always
awake. I’ll tell you about Taoism again, divide 52000 by 56,
recommend a dry cleaner in Toronto. But stop asking about the afterlife,
whether you should freeze your eggs, what makes a good Palestinian.
For god’s sake, how many times can I repeat myself in one night?
—Hala Alyan, “Siri as Mother,” Academy of American Poets, May 9, 2024
Oh little indoor England and its tiresome little adulteries! For the love of heaven, get outdoors!
—Harriet Monroe to Ezra Pound, May 1914
