When something is festering
in your memory or your imagination,
laws of silence don’t work,
it’s like shutting a door and locking it
on a house on fire
in hope of forgetting that the house is burning.
But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.
Silence about a thing just magnifies it.
It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant.
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Some of these things are true
and some of them lies.
But they are all good stories.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
True happiness, we are told,
consists in getting out of one's self;
but the point is not only to get out -
you must stay out;
and to stay out
you must have some absorbing errand.
Henry James, Roderick Hudson
The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin
is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation.
This never worked in the era of tea,
at least not at the same level of street cred.
Tana French, In the Woods
The spiritual disposition of a poet inclines to catastrophe.
Osip Mandelstam, Selected Essays
Whereas elsewhere in Europe,
no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular,
the Irish thought that all language was a game.
Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization