76 quotes found
Writer · British · 1936–2023
British writer (1936–2023)
“Good writing is always new.”
“Outside our small safe place flies mystery.”
“You will not be here--I shall not be here--much lo”
“All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.”
“My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop awaybut oh how I sing in my gold cage.”
“Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes a...”
“You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”
“For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".”
“The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.”
“Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Haro...”
“words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her f...”
“History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...”
“You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute ...”
“Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.”
“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”
“Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.”
“A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.”
“The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither...”
“Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mime...”
“Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].”
“You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.”
“it [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, and the transformations and transmutations of grief, like rot in the earth-mo...”
