A garland of quotations XXIII

Culled from the finest explorers in literary history, and re-woven every Monday

Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations.
•Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It (1914).

His attempts were like the pawings of an imp, sent from hell to seize and torment some guilty wretch, such as are exhibited in some dramatic performance, which I have never seen acted without remembering my wedding-night.
•Frances Vane, “The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” (1751).

Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.
•Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

I would be—for no knowledge is worth a straw—
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
•Yeats, “The Dawn” (1917).

Mr. Samuel Pepys
Eternally sleeps.
On instituting an enquiry
I found he wrote a Diary.
•E. Clerihew Bentley, The First Clerihews (1893).

The rock says ‘Endure’.
The wind says ‘Pursue’.
The sun says ‘I will suck your bones
And afterwards bury you.’
•Sidney Keyes, “The Wilderness” (1942).

You will hear the beat of horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods…
But there is no road through the woods.
•Kipling, “The Way through the Woods” (1910).

Hush! The woods grow dark and still
Save for the sad-voiced whippoorwill,
Sleep and rest. When thou wilt wake,
There’ll be a shining world to make!
•Robert P. Tristram Coffin, “Lullaby for a Peregrine” (1933).

I have had the gorgeous feeling of love but mainly I have had the cruddy feeling of love. All around the world I bet it is the same. Crud is the most normal feeling. They should write it in the sky so people will know it and not feel so bad.
•Lynda Barry, “Report on Love” (1990).

What more than anything else annoys people who know the true function of literature, and have profited thereby, is the spectacle of so many thousands of individuals going about under the delusion that they are alive, when, as a fact, they are no nearer being alive than a bear in winter.
•Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It (1914).

Sources: Vane: from Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (U GA, 2014); Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole (Scribner, 2017); Keyes: Brian Gardner, ed., The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–1945 (Methuen, 1993); Kipling: Rudyard Kipling's Verse Inclusive Edition: 1885–1926 (Doubleday-Doran, 1927); Coffin: Ballads of Square-Toed Americans (Mamcillan, 1933); Barry: My Perfect Life (D&Q, 2022); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.