A garland of quotations LXXXIX

Culled from the finest expectants in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday; a short story

(Upcoming appearances: Oct. 12, 1 pm, Breakwater Books, Guilford, CT | Oct. 25, 8 pm, Rocktober Bloodbath, Milford CT | Nov 2, 10 am, Norwalk Public Library Book & Author Festival, Norwalk, CT.)

Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.
•H.G. Wells, Mr. Belloc Objects to “The Outline of History” (1926).

I stand within Time’s crumbling walls and weave at Eternity’s looms the Circle-that-looks-like-a line.
I am leagued with the Sphinx, and her secretive mumblings I alone understand.
I am the footnote that explains that old undecipherable palimpsest called Life,
And it is for me the drum beats—the deadly intoning drumbeats that the mummer Man jigs to.
•Benjamin De Casseres, “The Circle-that-looks-like-a line” (1915).

From this summit, the country, he says, appears an indescribable chaos.
•Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U. S. A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West (1837).

A Little Boy was dreaming
    Upon his Nurse’s lap,
That the pins fell out of all the stars,
    And the stars fell into his cap.

So when the dream was over,
    What should the little Boy do?
Why, he went land look’d inside his cap,
    And found it wasn’t true.
•D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, “The Little Dreamer” (1865).

After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream.
•Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972).

Your taste in Architect, you know,
Hath been admir’d by Friend and Foe;
But can your earthly Domes compare
To all my Castles—in the Air?
•Fielding, “To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole” (1730).

This city (I thought) is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a sacred desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars. As long as it lasts, no one in the world can be strong or happy.
•Borges, “The Immortal” (1947).

If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old.
•C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1945).

If Seas of Blood and mighty Numbers slain,
If Nations long oppress’d, if cries of Men;
If Devastation, Cruelty and Death,
And blasting Nations with Tyrannick Breath;
If Flaming Towns, if ravish’d Vertue lies,
As steps to mount a Monarch to the Skies;
Lewis to reign above the Gods may claim,
And Jove resigns his Thunder and his Name.
•Defoe, Jure Divino (1706) [on Louis XIV].

But hadst thou, Alexander, wish’d to prove
Thy self the real Progeny of Jove,
Virtue another Path had bid thee find,
Taught thee to save, and not to slay Mankind.
•Fielding, “Of True Greatness” (1741) [on Alexander the Great].

Sources: Thompson: Nursery Nonsense; or, Rhymes without Reason (Griffith and Farran, 1865); Fielding: Miscellanies Volume One (Wesleyan UP, 1972); Borges: Labyrinths (New Directions, 1964); De Casseres: The Shadow Eater (American Library Service, 1923); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.