June 2010
27 posts
Hiatus
Apologies to everyone, but I will be taking a temporary hiatus just to get some things together. I will resume posting ASAP
“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”
– Robert Frost
“I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of...”
– Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes)
4 tags
Dreamland - Edgar Allan Poe
By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule- From a wild clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE- out of TIME. Bottomless vales and boundless floods, And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods, With forms that no man can discover For the tears that drip all...
3 tags
A Girl - Ezra Pound
The tree has entered my hands, The sap has ascended my arms, The tree has grown in my breast- Downward, The branches grow out of me, like arms. Tree you are, Moss you are, You are violets with wind above them. A child - so high - you are, And all this is folly to the world.
“Writers aren’t exactly people…. they’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald (via deadwriters) (via awritersruminations)
“Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the...”
– Suttree (by Cormac McCarthy) (via hmack) (via awritersruminations)
2 tags
from "Something Wicked This Way Comes" - Ray...
“So in sum, what are we? We are the creatures who know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have no choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do both…”
2 tags
from "Something Wicked This Way Comes" - Ray...
“Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks the happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smile and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh shouter half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love sin, Will. Oh how they love it, never...
3 tags
“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by...”
– William Faulkner
3 tags
“As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can...”
– Thomas Jefferson
4 tags
A Man Said to the Universe - Stephen Crane
A man said to the universe: “Sir I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”
“Do other artists feel as I do - the driving necessity - the crying need - the...”
– Katherine Mansfield (via rockingliketwoolddrunkards) (via katherinemansfieldproject) (via awritersruminations)
3 tags
“I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying...”
– Lord Byron
3 tags
A Brief History of Gods - Sukasah Syahdan
First, we worshipped the inanimate. Next, we learned to worship the gods Later, we discovered the Deity. Then, dazzled by our own Reason We returned to the inanimate And ended up worshipping anything, From football to economic growth.
3 tags
“The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.”
– Walt Whitman (via libraryland) (via readthiswritethat)
3 tags
Ever wanted to hear William Faulkner read to you? →
awritersruminations:
deadwriters:
William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962)
The author reads “As I Lay Dying”, which he wrote in six weeks time!
3 tags
Adam's Curse - W.B. Yeats
We sat together at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;...
3 tags
dying is fine)but Death - E.E. Cummings
dying is fine)but Death ?o baby i wouldn’t like Death if Death were good:for when(instead of stopping to think)you begin to feel of it,dying ’s miraculous why?be cause dying is perfectly natural;perfectly putting it mildly lively(but Death is strictly scientific & artificial & evil & legal) we thank thee god almighty for dying (forgive us,o life!the sin of Death
Again, again and again By Anne Sexton
awritersruminations:
paupaula:
You said the anger would come back just as the love did. I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates. It is old. It is also a pauper. I have tried to keep it on a diet. I give it no unction. There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have...
4 tags
I Dreamed my Genesis - Dylan Thomas
I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking Through the rotating shell, strong As motor muscle on the drill, driving Through vision and the girdered nerve. From limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffled Off from the creasing flesh, filed Through all the irons in the grass, metal Of suns in the man-melting night. Heir to the scalding veins that hold love’s drop, costly A creature...
2 tags
Manufactured Gods - Carl Sandburg
THEY put up big wooden gods. Then they burned the big wooden gods And put up brass gods and Changing their minds suddenly Knocked down the brass gods and put up A doughface god with gold earrings. The poor mutts, the pathetic slant heads, They didn’t know a little tin god Is as good as anything in the line of gods Nor how a little tin god answers prayer And makes rain and brings luck The same as a...
“Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction...”
– Madeleine L’Engle (via wordpainting)
1 tag
“America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer...”
– Mikhail Gorbachev
1 tag
“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 tag
“The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch...”
– Rhapsody on a Windy Night (via tseliot)
“We must write where we stand; wherever we do stand, there is life, and an...”
– John Updike (via wordpainting)
May 2010
64 posts
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness,...”
– Stephen King (On Writing) (via awritersruminations)
3 tags
from "Green Mansions" - William Henry Hudson
Flocks of birds, a kind of troupial, were flying past me overhead, flock succeeding flock, on their way to their roosting-place, uttering as they flew a clear, bell-like chirp; and there was something ethereal too in those drops of melodious sound, which fell into my heart like raindrops falling into a pool to mix their fresh heavenly water with the water of earth.
1 tag
from the Foreword of "Green Mansions" - W.H....
Writers are to their readers little new worlds to be explored; and each traveller in the realms of literature must needs have a favourite hunting ground, which, in his good will - or perhaps merely in his egoism - he would wish others to share with him.
3 tags
Thesauraus - Billy Collins
It could be the name of a prehistoric beast that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary, or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book. It means treasury, but it is just a place where words congregate with their relatives, a big park where hundreds of family reunions are always being held, house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,...
“A good library is a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and...”
– Samuel Niger (via bookshelves)
“The silent power of books is a great power in the world; and there is a joy in...”
– Henry Giles (via pithia) (via awritersruminations)
2 tags
“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better...”
– from “To Kill a Mocking Bird” - Harper Lee
A Hope for Poetry: Remembering the Sixties - Barry...
There was a hope for poetry in the sixties
And for education and society, teachers free
To do as they wanted: I could and did teach
Poetry and art all day and little else -
That was my way.
I threw rainbows against the classroom walls,
Gold and silver dragons in the corridors and
Halls; the children’s eyes were full of stars;
I taught the alphabet in Greek and spoke of
Peace and war in Vietnam,...
“What matters, finally, isn’t finding the kind of person you should love. What...”
– Starting Out in the Evening. (via literarylovers)
1 tag
“I’ll publish, right or wrong,
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.”
– Lord Byron
“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
– W. H. Auden (via wordpainting)
“I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife,...”
– White Oleander, Janet Fitch (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes) (via abetterresurrection)
A Writer's Ruminations: Sunflower Sutra by Allen... →
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry. Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and…
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born...”
– Pearl Buck (via lexicology) (via tobia) (via septembrist) (via whoaskedyou) (via livefrugallyonsurprise) (via bridgettelizabeth) (via nathanielstuart) (via booklover) (via wordpainting)
“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by...”
– Plato (via thirdofmay)
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”
– Oscar Wilde
3 tags
from "Preludes:Growth of a Poet" - William...
Sometimes it suits me better to invent A tale from my own heart, more near akin To my own passions and habitual thoughts; Some variegated story, in the main Lofty, but the unsubstantial structure melts Before the very sun that brightens it, Mist into air dissolving! Then a wish, My best and favorite aspiration, mounts With yearning toward some philosophic song Of Truth that cherishes our daily...
3 tags
Sonnet to Liberty - Oscar Wilde
These are the letters which Endymion wrote To one he loved in secret, and apart. And now the brawlers of the auction mart Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note, Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote The merchant’s price. I think they love not art Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat. Is it not said that many years ago, In a...
2 tags
from "Little Women" - Louisa May Alcott
There are so many beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners til needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices til the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the...”
– Albert Camus
from "Indications" - Walt Whitman
THE indications, and tally of time; Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs; Time, always without flaw, indicates itself in parts; What always indicates the poet, is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their words; The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark—but the words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark; The maker of poems...
“The Snow-Storm” by Ralph Waldo...
Mark Twain's autobiography to be finally... →
awritersruminations:
azspot:
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of...