Throughout long, arduous journey's the artist walks, passing bones scattered throughout rocky landscapes, loneliness always beckoning, I've found it helpful to read quotes from famous authors. Since the bulk of us are fans, aspiring or already established writers of the weird tale, a genre H.P. Lovecraft said "Has a limited audience", and is low brow in the eyes of the general public even today, gosh will that ever go away? Help from those who walked the paths before us serve as nourishment to the soul. What are some of your favorite authors quotes which help spur you on?

I wonder if Clark had any quotes? Dr. Farmer, do you know of any?

Here is mine: We work n the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. - Henry James.

I have mentioned Clark's "Sweet are the uses of Obscurity" -(Shakespeare redevisti) - I know that he like Pepys but don't recall any quatrain that he was specifically fone of - He was also a fan of Dr. Johnhson's "Truth, sir, is a cow that will yield them no more milk, so they have gone to milk the Bull!"

Some (longer) quotes I love:

From Sidney Lanier's "Nirvana":

"By waves swept on, I learned to ride the waves.
I served my masters till I made them slaves.
I baffled Death by hiding in his graves,
His watery graves, Nirvana."

and another stanza:

"And never a king but had some king above,
And never a law to right the wrongs of Love,
And ever a fanged snake beneath a dove,
Saw I on earth, Nirvana."

Not famous, but it ought to be:

"Why, what's the world and time? a fleeting thought
In the great meditating universe,
A brief parenthesis in chaos."


--Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Can't recall where I saw it cited, but CAS was a Beddoes admirer.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 4 Dec 11 | 05:02PM by Absquatch.

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved; and next to Nature, Art.
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Walter Savage Landor.

If you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.

Gore Vidal.

---

1 + 26 = ∞.

The mediocre never match the great, but the great often match the mediocre.

Language is an isthmus between reality and imagination.

Language makes sense of the senses.

Wasps can sting; birds can sing: words can do both.

When you open a book, the second-most complex thing known to man is right before your eyes. The most complex thing of all is right behind your eyes.

Onan the Vulgarian.

---

“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.” — The Black Book of Gore Vidal.

I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but on re-reading this thread today, I would add Schopenhauer's, "Talent hits the target no one else can hit; Genius hits the target no one else can see."

Quote:

Macbeth, Act V, sc. v
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

No one beats the Bard,
-Cathexis