Literature and Words

For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

A house that has a library in it has a soul.

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

O vocables of love, The end of an end is an echo, A last cry follows a last cry. Finality of finality Is perfection’s touch of folly.

 

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

 

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

For most of my reading I go back to the old ones – for comfort.

A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

They gave it me,—for an un-birthday present.

Poetry is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

 

The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them. . . . The traditional culture . . . is, of course, mainly literary . . . the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive.

 

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That’s why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones.

 

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make abody of more or less connected legend, rangingfrom the large and cosmogonic, to the level ofromantic fairy-story—the larger founded onthe lesser in contact with the earth, the lesserdrawing splendor from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate simply to: to England; tomy country.

 

There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Mastering the lawless science of our law,

 

Literature is news that STAYS news.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.