writteninsentences

[writteninsentences]

Alas, the heart is not a metaphor - or not only a metaphor.

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

[writteninsentences]

She thought...of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.

Vladimir Nabokov, Symbols and Signs

[writteninsentences]

The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

[writteninsentences]

The anvil must be somewhere in the centre, Horned as a unicorn Seams Heaney, The Forge

[writteninsentences]

I knew immediately something momentous had occurred but I didn't trust myself to think what if was until later, when I was alone in my room again in bed with the lights out and the crickets in the fields of Onondaga beating away like the night's loud pulse, as if night were an enormous body, like the sea, with things living in it, making love in it, and lying dead in it, E.L.Doctorow, Billy Bathgate

[writteninsentences]

The oyster is not a creature of the open sea.  It needs bays, coves, estuaries, and the coast of Brittany is the perfect geological crotchet-work, after some terrible kitten had got through with it; if pulled out straight it would probably reach across the Atlantic and if you threw in the islands there is no telling where you would end up.

Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer

[writteninsentences]

Some people actually desire honesty. They must never have broken into their solitary houses after having misplaced the key, never seen with an intruder's eyes what is theirs. Stephen Dunn, After Making Love

[writteninsentences]

Almost unnoted are the foreground silences, before the achievement. (Remember when Emerson hailed Whitman’s genius, he guessed correctly: “which yet must have had a long foreground for such a start.”) George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, A.E. Coppard, Angus Wilson, Joyce Cary - all close to, or in their forties before they became published writers; Lampedusa, Maria Dermout (The Ten Thousand Things), Laura Ingalls Wilder…in their sixties.

Tillie Olsen, Silences

Hope for the late starters and bloomers.

[writteninsentences]

A poet is doomed to resort to words.

Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason

[writteninsentences]

Still in the midst of their inquietude every one of the old women would have liked to have heard more of this strange heresy, as if, after all, the tender and dangerous emotions of the human heart were, even within their own safe reclusion, by right their domain. It was as if the tall bouquets of dried flowers in front of the convents' pier glasses had stirred and claimed authority when a question of floriculture was being raised.

Isak Dinesen, The Monkey

Why has no-one ever told me how good Isak Dinesen is?

[writteninsentences]

He was dressed like this: next his white skin, the shimmer of silk; and his satin girdle around him; and his tunic, that reward of service and gift of fealty from Congal, was like this - crimson, close-woven, bordered in gemstones and gold, a rustle of sashes and loops, the studded silver gleaming, the slashed hem embroidered in points. He had an iron-shod spear in each hand, a shield of mottled horn on his back, a gold-hilted sword at his side.

Sweeney Astray, a version by Seamus Heaney

[writteninsentences]

Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives

Philip Larkin, Reference Back

[writteninsentences]

                              Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken Luminously-peopled air ascends

Philip Larkin, Here

[writteninsentences]

The soul,

like the square root of minus 1, is an impossibility that has its uses.

Vijay Seshadri, Imaginary Number

[writteninsentences]

Scottish literature, like all other literatures, has been written almost exclusively by blasphemists, immoralists, dipsomaniacs, and madmen, but unlike most other literatures, has been written about almost exclusively by ministers...

Hugh MacDiarmid

[writteninsentences]

Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies begin to rise: up, then down, then up again: lit on the ascending flight, drifting simultaneously to the same height, - exactly like the bubbles in champagne.

Elizabeth Bishop, A Cold Spring

[writteninsentences]

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation