Author: cwq
“I’ve always thought of the Red Owl Grocery Store in Plainview, Minnesota, as my training ground, for it was there that I acquired the latent qualities necessary to the novelist, namely … the fun of picking the individual out of a crowd and the joy of finding the precise words to describe him. I dare say nobody ever got more nourishment than I did out of a grocery store.”
Jon Hassler
“When I write a poem, I don’t know quite what it means. If I think I know what it means, I’ve got a bad poem. I want a poem to be beyond me. I want it to be something that transfers a feeling I don’t quite understand the limits of.”
“Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.”
A.E. Housman
“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”
Flannery O’Connor
“So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”
Brenda Ueland
“If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”
Robert Southey