I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.
A lonely impulse of delight
...I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl -- a cousin I think -- having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she knew [my grandfather] would pass near four o'clock on the...
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.
The Cat and the Moon The cat went here and thereAnd the moon spun round like a top,And the nearest kin of the moon,The creeping cat, looked up.Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,For, wander and wail...
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Surely some revelation is at hand.
It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
What can be explained is not poetry.
Wine enters through the mouth,Love, the eyes.I raise the glass to my mouth,I look at you,I sigh.
We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.
And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, nd upon all your relations.'Is he cursing in rhyme?'He...
An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress
Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the peo...
Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O belov...
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi...