- To “haul / Steadily off the bottom” reinscribes Heaney’s figure for learning one’s craft by “learning to turn the windlass at the well of poetry.” “Usually,” writes Heaney elsewhere, “you begin by dropping the bucket halfway down the shaft and winding up taking air. You are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. You’ll have broken the skin on the pool of yourself. Your praties will be ‘fit for digging.’”
- There are revealing contrasts between this warm lit-up place and Van Gogh's 'The All-night Café' in Arles. Van Gogh wrote, 'In my painting of the 'All-Night Café I've tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, become crazy and criminal. Through the contrast of delicate pink, blood red and dark red, of mild Louis-XV and Veronese green against the yellow-green and stark blue-green tones - all this in an atmosphere like the devil's inferno and pale sulphurous yellow ... I've tried to convey the sinister power of such a place.'
- Statius says to Virgil (Purgatorio XXII, 67-73), "You were like one who goes by night and carries the light behind him and profits not himself, but makes those wise who follow him."
- In an interview with The Paris Review in 1956, Faulkner remarked, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
- In a letter written during 1913, D. H. Lawrence writes, "I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not…" He is also quoted as saying, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16."
mar 2 2011 ∞
jun 13 2013 +
jun 13 2013 +