A garland of quotations LII
Culled from the finest nightingales in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.
•Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathurstra (1883).
Along came the bishop, his robe a tatter:
Sleep and it won’t matter.
•Niedecker, For Paul: Six Alternative Sequences, Group Two (1951).
To me, even kind sleep is cruel.
•Nonnos, Dionysiaca (C5).
Night is always a giant, but this one was especially terrible.
•Nabokov, Transparent Things (1972).
Arouse thyself! How long more wilt thou slumber?
See thyself, full of marvels without number.
•Nasir, Six Chapters (C11).
Since thou hast the world,—be world-possessor!
When enemies sleep,—be thou vigilant!
•Nizami, The Sikandar náma,e bara, or Book of Alexander the Great (1194).
In domes deprived of heaven’s free gift, the light,
Shall Albion’s sons endure a Greenland night.
•Robert Nixon (attr.), prophecy on submerged boulder, transcribed 1747.
Everything of which we are conscious, all that is thinkable and understandable, is but thin ice on the high mountains of the unconscious, snow that will quickly melt under the storms of fate, of some intoxication, of the trembling of the soul. Life would rather hide its ultimate secrets in a small folksong heard in the village night than in fat and scholarly books. It is vain to try to plumb the depths. We will never, by ourselves, learn the essential. All we can do is be moved by it.
•Gottfried Neesse, Psalter of a Young Nazi (1933).
N.B. Once again I have learned to sleep (without soporifics).
•Nietzsche, letter to Bernhard and Elizabeth Förster, 12/1885.
I wish we were all as beautiful as the day.
•Nesbit, Five Children and It (1902).
Sources: Niedecker: From This Condensery (Jargon Society/Inland Book Co., 1985); Nonnos: trans. W.H.D. Rouse (Loeb/Harvard UP, 1995); Nasir: quoted in Reuben Levy, Persian Literature: An Introduction (Oxford, 1955); Nizami: trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke (W.H. Allen, 1881); Nixon: from Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecies; Reprinted and Edited from the Best Sources, and Including a Copy of the Prophecy from an Unpublished Manuscript (Abel Heywood & Son, 1878); Neese: quoted in Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels (Stein & Day, 1982); Nietzsche: Unpublished Letters (Philosophical Library, 1959); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.