I eventually discovered that coots aren’t ducks at all. They just blend in the way a toupee blends in—convincing from a distance, questionable up close. Ducks belong to the Anatidae family, while coots are in the Rallidae family, which means they are technically rails. In a genealogical sense, they’re more closely related to cranes than to mallards. But try telling that to a coot surrounded by actual ducks.
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Stephen Spender on Loneliness and American Literature
Intense loneliness gives all great American literature something in common, the sense of a lonely animal moving through the dark, like the wolves in a story of Jack London, the White Whale chased across a waste of seas in Melville, the sensitive and exploitable young American seeking his own soul through ruined European places, of James.
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Nick Cave on the Artistic Impulse and Other Responsibilities
The creative urge is a gift not afforded to everyone, and those of us who possess it bear a responsibility to pursue that impulse wholeheartedly. However, there are other duties beyond those at the tip of your brush or nib of my pen — beautiful and sacrificial fidelities. You have committed to your wife and son to offer them more than just the crumbs of yourself, the dregs of what remains of you after a day with the devil in the shed. You are in service to your creative impulses — and by the same token to God — but you are also in service to the world as it presents…
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Polanyi on Tradition and the Intellectual Life
I must admit now that I did not start the present reconsideration of my beliefs with a clean slate of unbelief. Far from it. I started as a person intellectually fashioned by a particular idiom, acquired through my affiliation to a civilization that prevailed in the places where I had grown up, at this particular period of history. This has been the matrix of all my intellectual efforts. Within it I was to find my problem and seek the terms for its solution. All my amendments to these original terms will remain embedded in the system of my previous beliefs.
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Eliot on Emptiness and Dependence
Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.
