T.S. Eliot
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair. — T.S. Eliot, from “La Figlia che Piange,” quoted in The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon (Virago Press, 2022)
Category: Biography
Frederick Buechner
It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of… Continue reading Frederick Buechner
James Salter
A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page. — James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection (Knopf Doubleday, 2011)
Ben Whishaw
A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to… Continue reading Ben Whishaw
Jean-Dominique Bauby
I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. — Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. (Vintage June 23, 1998)
Rebecca Solnit
As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in… Continue reading Rebecca Solnit
Ernest Hemingway
When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good… Continue reading Ernest Hemingway
Dave Eggers
I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it’s hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while… Continue reading Dave Eggers
Primo Levi
I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail. It is again among… Continue reading Primo Levi
Harry Crews
It has always seemed to me that I was not so much born into this life as I awakened to it. — Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. (University of Georgia Press October 1, 1995) Originally published 1978.
The Vale of Soul-Making 