Literature and Words

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of heaven’s joy, Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice, and Verse.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Speech is civilisation itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.

There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

The best fame is a writer’s fame: it’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough that you get interrupted when you eat.

[A pun] is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

Books think for me.

Your borrowers of books —those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,

Poems are made by fools like me,

‘Load every rift’ of your subject with ore.

Fine writing is next to fine doing the top thing in the world.

The Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Souls of poets dead and gone,

Whatsoever he [Shakespeare] penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’.