A garland of quotations CXII
Culled from the finest secondary arsonists in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
An emerald is as green as grass;
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.
A diamond is a brilliant stone,
To catch the world’s desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
But a flint holds fire.
•Christina Rossetti, Sing-Song (1872).
At that time you carried your ashes to the mountains; Would you now carry your fire into the valley? Do you not fear to be punished as an arsonist?
•Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathurstra (1883).
The largest Fire ever known
Occurs each Afternoon—
Discovered is without surprise
Proceeds without concern—
Consumes and no report to men
An Occidental Town,
Rebuilt another morning
To be again burned down.
•Emily Dickinson, #1114 (c.1864).
Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of “Light-chafers,” large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But—!
•Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841).
It was perfect & wrong, like money on fire. •Ocean Vuong, “American Legend” (2022).
Walking down Main
all the houses on fire
I say can this be real?
I say—excuse me—
can this be real?
•Anne Waldman, “Close Call” (1973).
“It’s unrealistic here,” an attractive brunette Alpha Chi Omega said as she surveyed the beach outside Margaritaville. She either meant surreal or unreal; I wasn’t sure which.
•Alexandra Robbins, Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities (2004).
They ain’t real, I thought as I walked down the hall, nary one. But I knew they were. You come into a strange place, into a town like Mason City, and they don’t seem real, but you know they are. You know they went wading in the creek when they were kids, and when they were bigger they used to go out about sunset and lean on the back fence and look across the country at the sky and not know what was happening inside them or whether they were happy or sad, and when they got grown they slept with their wives and tickled their babies to make them laugh and went to work in the morning and didn’t know what they wanted but had their reasons for doing things and wanted to do good things, because they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten was they reasons were like. And then they will lie in bed some morning just before day and look up at the ceiling they can scarcely see because the lamp in shaded with a pinned-on newspaper and they don’t recognize the faces around the bed any more because the room is full of smoke, and it makes their eyes burn and gets in their throat. Oh, they are real, all right, and it may be the reason they don’t seem real to you is that you aren’t very real yourself.
•Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946).
This so-called universe appears as a juggling, a picture show. To be happy look upon it so.
•Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra (C7?).
“Let us go to Montmartre,” an English visitor was overheard to say: “It is the best place to watch Paris burning.”
•G.M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936).
Sources: Nietzsche: The Portable Nietzsche (Viking, 1966); Dickinson: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little Brown, 1976); Vuong: Time Is a Mother (Penguin, 2022); Waldman: Life Notes (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973); Vijñāna: in Paul Reps, ed., Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Doubleday, 1989); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.
