are you dreaming, Frederick?

"When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves."
--John Steinbeck, Cannery Row


"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only."
--George Eliot, Middlemarch


"Reading is important. Books are important. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)"
--Neil Gaiman


"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes--characters even--caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you."
--Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.


"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite...A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then--the glory--so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished."
--John Steinbeck, East of Eden


"[...]society deserves the type of crime it gets. Looking at crime honestly raises uncomfortable questions: about the inequality in society, about who holds the power in society."
--Richard Flynn, as quoted by Carolyn Nordstrom in Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World


"What we do not see often becomes not only invisible, but also inevitable. Before people could conceive of pathogens invisible to the human eye, we could not develop vaccinations or antibiotics. Death from infection was inevitable. In the same way, if we cannot see the fonts of power and the integral patterns defining the legal and illegal, we will see dangerous hegemonies and the lethal clash of il/legalities as inevitable, and inescapable fact of the human condition."
--Carolyn Nordstrom, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World


"[...]her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out."
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah


"This was love, to be eager for tomorrow."
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah


"One winter night when he was a boy, boarding then with a half-brother who was half-heartedly religious, he first saw a ring around the moon. He stared up at it, immense, icy, half as wide as the night sky, and grew certain that it could only mean the End of the World. He waited thrilled in that suburban yard for the still night to break apart in apocalypse, all the while knowing in his heart that it would not: that there is nothing in this world not proper to it and that it contains no such surprises. That night he dreamt of Heaven: Heaven was a dark amusement park, small and joyless, just an iron Ferris wheel turning in eternity and a glum arcade to amuse the faithful. He awoke relieved, and never after believed his prayers, though he had said them for his brother without rancor. He would say hers, if she asked him to, and gladly; but she said none, that he knew of; she asked instead assent to something, something so odd, so unencompassable by the common world he had always lived in, so--he laughed, amazed. 'A fairy tale,' he said.

" 'I guess,' she said sleepily. She reached behind her for his hand, and drew it around her. 'I guess, if you want.'

"He knew he would have to believe in order to go where she had been; knew that, if he believed, he could go there even if it didn't exist, if it was make-believe. He moved the hand she had drawn around her down her long flesh, and with a little sound she pressed herself against him. He searched himself for that old will, long in disuse. If she went there, ever, he didn't want to be left behind; wanted never to be farther from her than this."
--John Crowley, Little, Big


"She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and the doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious."
--John Crowley, Little, Big


"[...]the difference between the Ancient concept of the world and the New concept is, in the Ancient concept the world has a framework of Time, and in the New concept, a framework of Space.

"To look at the Ancient concept through the spectacles of the New concept is to see absurdity: seas that never were, worlds claimed to have fallen to pieces and been created newly, a congeries of unlocatable Trees, Islands, Mountains and Maelstroms. But the Ancients were not fools with a poor sense of direction; it was only not Orbis Terrae that they were looking at. When they spoke of the four corners of the earth, they meant of course no four physical places; they meant four repeated situations of the world, equidistant in time from one another: they meant the solstices and the equinoxes. When they spoke of seven spheres, they did not mean (until Ptolemy foolishly tried to take their portrait) seven spheres in space; they meant those circles described in Time by the motions of the stars: Time, that roomy seven-storey mountain where Dante's sinners wait for Eternity. When Plato tells of a river girdling the earth, which is somewhere (so the New concept would have it) up in the air and somewhere also in the middle of the earth, he means by that river the same river Heraclitus could never step in twice. Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time's body. And how will we perceive this body, and how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form--the qualities of Space. Not by measurement and exploration. No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory."
--John Crowley, Little, Big

" 'Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?' Mo had said... 'As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.' "
--Cornelia Funke, Inkspell


"So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon them in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks."
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway


"The desire to do something really wonderful, and the worry that it's really awful--and how to rebound from those two situations. I think the most difficult thing is looking at your work and understanding what to edit, and what not to do. I mean there are a million decisions you have to make, and I guess, in the end, one hopes to not be boring. That would horrify me until the end of time if I thought my work was boring. You also have to have perseverance--and maybe that's the hardest thing, to persevere and to believe that what you're doing is worth doing--and to do it, rather than talking about doing it."
--Maira Kalman


"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
--Aristotle


"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
--Stephen R. Covey


"Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond knowing what to think."
--Neil DeGrasse Tyson


"Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. She very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own."
--Virginia Woolf, Night and Day


"This moment I stand on is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change; one flying after another, so quick so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous--we human beings; and show the light through. But what is the light?"
--Virginia Woolf, Diary Entry, 4 January 1929


"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."
--G. K. Chesterton


"This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles."
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun


"The Diameter of the Bomb"
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.
--Yehuda Amichai


"Now That I Am Never Alone"
In the bath I look up and see the brown moth
pressed like a pair of unpredictable lips
against the white wall. I heat up
the water, running as much hot in as I can stand.
These handfuls over my shoulder--how once
he pulled my head against his thigh and dipped
a rivulet down my neck of coldest water from the spring
we were drinking from. Beautiful mischief
that stills a moment so I can never look
back. Only now, brightest now, and the water
never hot enough to drive that shiver out.

But I remember solitude--no other
presence and each thing what it was. Not this raw
fluttering I make of you as you have made of me
your watch-fire, your killing light.
--Tess Gallagher