“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.”
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899
Wealth without real worthiness
Is no good for the neighbourhood …
—Sappho, “Fragment 148” (tr. by Aaron Poochigian), late 7th–early 6th century B.C.
A giant clam has hundreds, if not thousands, of eyes, which lie on the exposed flesh that lines the shell, and work like pinhole cameras. …
This very heavy animal is made of almost weightless light: the clam gives light to the zooxanthellae, which produce sugars and proteins, which the clam uses to make its calcium carbonate shell. Light does have weight: a box of light is heavier than an empty box. Darkness weighs nothing. And the clam is afraid of the dark.
—Helen Sullivan, “A clam: made of light and all the while afraid of the dark,” The Guardian, August 19, 2024
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
Memory, the whole lying opera of it.
—Barry Hannah, “Testimony of Pilot,” Airships, 1978
[The] “creative entrepreneur” was conceived in explicit relation to the daimon, the godlike, frighteningly ambiguous, and often destructive power of inspiration. …
The study of entrepreneurship, economics, and capitalism, and thus some of the framing forces of our time, necessitated rational engagement with the irrational, with the daimons inside us and the boxes around us.
—Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, “The Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and the Daimonic Entrepreneur,” History of Political Economy, 49:2, June 2017
We love to be at once, miserable, and unhurt.
—Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 1759
Our jovial conversation blooms and booms
in love’s large company, as our sweet
words ripen and split their skins:
mulberry, fabulous, flotation,
phlegmatic, plumbaginous.
Let our large hearts attack us,
our blood run us off the scale.
We’re huge and whole on this simmering night,
battened against the small skinny
futures that must befall all of us,
the gray thin days and the noncaloric dark.
—Ronald Wallace, “The Fat of the Land,” The Makings of Happiness, 1991
I once saw a Japanese climber in Richard and Dorothy Jones’s store there, buying a cabbage. It was a purple cabbage and somewhat larger than his own head, which was purple as well, in places, from contusions and sunburn, and probably windburn, suffered in his bout with the mountain. On his cheek was a welted wound, like a split in a tomato. Leaving the store, he walked out of town, ate his cabbage, and slept it off in a tent.
—John McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1976
‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’
—Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, 1938
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
—Mark Twain, introductory note, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884
Two unfinished stark white citadels towered above the terrain from hilltops on opposite shores of a dismal swamp, more like ruins amid the fallen fragments. … Where monuments had been planned, brush piles moldered and rubbish heaps accumulated.
—James Sterling Young, The Washington Community: 1800–1828, 1966
… Let me see some
more. The purpose you undertake is dangerous.
Why, that’s certain. ’Tis dangerous to take a cold,
to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my Lord Fool, out
of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
—William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, Act II, Scene 3
Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey, a little sun,
That we may obey Persephone’s bees. …
Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.
—Osip Mandelstam, “The Necklace” (tr. by Christian Wiman), 1922
Eldorado in the grass have found,
Which not the rich earth’s ample round
May match in wealth, thou art more dear to me
Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be. …
Thou art my tropics and mine Italy.
—James Russell Lowell, “To the Dandelion,” Graham’s Magazine, 1845
The genius of Melville is that he saw that this is a country that needs a monster. The delusion of one madman, Captain Ahab, meant that the white whale had to go.
—Carlos Fuentes, “Novel Politics,” The New York Times, April 30, 2006
I may look like a beer salesman, but I’m a poet.
—Theodore Roethke, job interview with the president of Bennington College, early 1940s
