The Argonauts

I didn't send the fragment because I had in any way achieved its serenity. I sent it with the aspiration that one day I might--that one day my jealousy might recede, and I would be able to behold the names and images of others inked onto your skin without disjunct or distaste.

~Maggie Nelson

Half Empty

Art was salvation, art was revolution. There was a war going on and the soldiers were those engaged in the deadly serious and downright heroic business of making art.

~David Rakoff

Paris Review Interview

In New York you may have the greatest and most congenial friends, but it's extraordinary if you ever know anything about them except that little wedge of their life that you meet with the little wedge of your life. You don't get that sense of a continuous narrative line. You never see the full circle. But in the South, where people don't move about as much, even now, and where they once hardly ever moved away at all, the pattern of life was always right there.

~Eudora Welty

The Life of Samuel Johnson: Dread of Solitude

"But, as Xerxes wept when he viewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and think; but that the thoughts of each individual there, would be distressing when alone."

~Samuel Johnson, recorded by James Boswell

Paris Review Interview

I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn't love one's country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don't think you can escape it. There isn't any other place to go--you don't pull up your roots and put them down someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, you'll be aware of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always elsewhere. If you try to pretend you don't see the immediate reality that formed you I think you'll go blind.

~James Baldwin

Pudd'nhead Wilson

Adam was but human--this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

~Mark Twain

The Little Prince

"Men?" she echoed. "I think there are six or seven of them in existence. I saw them several years ago. But one never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult."

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery