This space is devoted to the collection of phrases that strike me for their truth, their beauty, their clarity, and occasionally their wit. Here are some:
"on one knee in a fortress by the green sea"
-the last line of a poem that was submitted to the literary magazine at my school. the rest of the poem was terribly, terribly mediocre, but this line stood alone.
"secure and beautiful and adequate"
-Darius I
"visitings of awful promise, when the light of sense goes out in flashes that have shewn to us the invisible world"
-Wordsworth, The Prelude
"I am stretched on the rack of doubt."
-Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
"The deeds of Wilibert of Waverley in the Holy Land, his long absence and perilous adventures, his supposed death, and his return in the evening when the betrothed of his heart had wedded the hero who had protected her from insult and oppression during his absence; the generosity with which the Crusader relinquished his claims, and sought in a neighboring cloister that peace which passeth not away; -- to these and similar tales he would hearken till his heart glowed and his eye glistened."
-Sir Walter Scott, Waverley
"humble, squalid, time-marking human thought"
-Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms
"History provides a lot of exits from our particular prisons."
-Henry Shapiro, one of my professors
"She's irreplaceable. She's not perfect, but she's irreplaceable."
-Hatley High, a wonderful farce of high-school movies that everyone who grew up in the '90s with a light heart should possibly watch
"It's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them."
-Gertrude Stein's response to the development of the A-bomb
"Every friendship has its private library and private footnotes."
-Rose Rejouis, one of my professors
"The saddest words of pen or tongue: I meant to go when I was young."
-Garrison Keillor, Liberty
"an accumulation of unknowns"
-Ariana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl
"In every parting there is an image of death."
-George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
