It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
- Pat Schneider.
macrolit:
On this day (7 March) in 1923, The New Republic published Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping By Woods
on a Snowy Evening.”
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”
- Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America.
“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”
- Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America.
“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!”
- Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers.
“It was the beginning of the greatest Christmas ever. Little food. No presents. But there was a snowman in their basement.”
- Markus Zusak, The Book Thief.
“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“The house was very quiet, and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.”
- E.M. Forster, Howards End.
“Stories never really end… even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don’t end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.”
- Cornelia Funke, Inkspell.
“He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew… then it was too high.”
- Terry Pratchett, Night Watch.