I took the print of life not outwardly but inwardly upon the raw, the whole, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance but no name. — Virginia Woolf, The Waves . (Harvest Books 1978) Originally published… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
…imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. — Ted Hughes, Poetry… Continue reading Ted Hughes
We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost. — Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (Grove Press, 2014)
I am tired of tears and laughter,And men that laugh and weep;Of what may come hereafterFor men that sow to reap:I am weary of days and hours,Blown buds of barren flowers,Desires and dreams and powersAnd everything but sleep. — Algernon Charles Swinburne, from “The Garden of Proserpine,” The Garden of Persophone. (Simon King; Limited e.… Continue reading Algernon Charles Swinburne
Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning. ― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Vintage, January 1,… Continue reading Angela Carter
Red Red was your colour.If not red, then white. But redWas what you wrapped around you.Blood-red. Was it blood?Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?Haematite to make immortalThe precious heirloom bones, the family bones. When you had your way finallyOur room was red. A judgement chamber.Shut casket for gems. The carpet of bloodPatterned with darkenings,… Continue reading Ted Hughes
Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel. — Neil Gaiman, Stardust (William Morrow; Reprint edition, October 30, 2012) Originally published January 1, 1998.
“The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.” ― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (Macmillian; 1ST edition, January 1, 2001)
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius Press; First edition, June 19, 1995)
[W]e are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood–echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard). — Mary Webb, Gone to Earth (Constable, 1917)
The Vale of Soul-Making 