Read through the most famous quotes by topic #william
The Praying Mantis Visits A Penthouse The praying Mantis with its length of straw Out of nowhere's forehead born full armed Engaged the century at my terrace door. Focused at inches the dinosaur insect sends Broadsides of epic stillness at my eye, Above the deafening projects of the age. My love, who fears the thunder of its poise, Has seen it and cries out. The clouds like curls Fall in my faith as I seize a stick to stop This Martian raid distilled to a straw with legs, To wisps of prowess. Bristling with motionlessness The Mantis prays to the Stick twice armed with Man. I strike, the stick whistles, shearing off two legs Which run off by themselves beneath some boards. The Mantis spreads out tints of batlike wing, The many colored pennants of its blood, And hugs my weapon; the frantic greens come out, the reds and yellows blurt out from the straw, All sinews doubtless screaming insect death. Against the railing's edge I knock the stick Sending that gay mad body into the gulf. Such noisy trappings in defeat wake doubts. I search my mind for possible wounds and feel The victim's body heavy on the victor's heart. ↗
Well, what do you want me to say?' The Doctor was so angry he was almost hovering. 'Well done on marrying the only male nurse not to have a full set of Barbara Streisand records? Why did you pick him, anyway? Were there no flight attendants in your village?' 'Only Jeff,' [Amy replied]. 'Ah.'... 'I picked Rory, always Rory, because he is just like you,' I [Amy] yelled at him. 'He is sweet and understanding and funny and he always tries to do the right thing. Plus you both run the same way.' 'We do not.' 'Do so. ↗
(about William Blake) As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me." And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy." ...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. ↗
Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word ↗
#genius #reality #william-blake #writing #art
Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.) ↗
The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare. ↗
