“Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon—incredibly excellent topaz & ruby at 4 o’clock, cold & shabby at 6.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle.”

Walker Percy

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“The sky was peach and gold, a teacup of a morning, just enough clouds so as not to mock us.”

Elizabeth McCracken

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“My most thrilling musical experience was in Time Square, over thirty years ago. There was a rehearsal hall around the Brill Building where all the rooms were divided into tiny spaces with just enough room to open the door. Inside was a spinet piano— cigarette burns, missing keys, old paint and no pedals. You go in and close the door and it’s so loud from other rehearsals you can’t really work—so you stop and listen and the goulash of music was thrilling. Scales on a clarinet, tango, light opera, sour string quartet, voice lessons, someone belting out ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses,’ garage bands, and piano lessons. The floor was pulsing, the walls were thin. As if ten radios were on at the same time, in the same room. It was a train station of music with all the sounds milling around…for me it was heavenly.”

Tom Waits

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“Words shouted into a fierce gale which is anyway blowing in the wrong direction.”

Saul Bellow

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“At the right there was an old House—the window was open. We could see a table with a greenish oil cloth, on it a long bread, a bottle of wine, heavy white plates. We could only see the old hands of the people who were eating. A hand passed a basket with 2 peaches on it. It was all the paintings of the world, quiet, resisting time, everlasting. It is the only image of duration and eternity I have seen in a long time.”

Anaïs Nin

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“Music is like acupuncture—the exact same treatment, the exact same songs, even the exact same recording will move people, even the same people at different times, in very different ways. If someone is unmoved, its none of my business—I don’t mind, I don’t care.”

Jolie Holland

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“A book is a cubic piece of burning, smoking conscience—and nothing else.”

Boris Pasternak

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“I knew from the very first that some day there would be a cow here. One of the first things that turned up when we bought the place was a milking stool, an old one, handmade, smooth with the wax finish which only the seat of an honest man’s breeches can give to wood.”

E. B. White

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“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

Henry James

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“I can’t afford to regret. That life is simply gone now, and I can’t regret its passing. I have to live in the present. The life back then is gone just as surely—it’s as remote to me as if it had happened to somebody I read about in a nineteenth-century novel. I don’t spend more than five minutes a month in the past. The past really is a foreign country, and they do things differently there.”

Raymond Carver

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“So sensitive, said a family friend, that she could feel the grass grow under her feet.”

Bill Roorbach

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“On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.”

John Steinbeck

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“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”

John Steinbeck

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“I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandparents ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.”

Lorrie Moore

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