"My dear God, how stupid we people are until You give us something. Even in praying it is You who have to pray in us. I would like to write a beautiful prayer but I have nothing to do it from. There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted. I am not a philosopher or I could understand these things."
Leopoldo Pomés
Cara Gonier
At Les Deux Magots, Paris 1944
Simone de Beauvoir
1925-2012
Jack Gilbert
He said that the only things really worth writing about were these: "Love, death, man, virtue, nature, magnitude, excellence, evil, suffering, courage, morality. What is the good life. What is honor. Who am I."
D.H. Lawrence
"No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me."
Janet Flanner
“For the next 50 years, Flanner wrote nearly 700 installments of her Letter from Paris for The New Yorker under the name Genêt. To prepare for the column, she read at least eight French newspapers each day, clipping out interesting items and then meeting with people to follow up on them. She also wrote profiles and essays for the magazine, including a three-part piece on Hitler several years before the start of WWII.”
http://www.loc.gov
John Cowper Powys
“Powys was at heart a luddite, for whom virtually every modern invention was anathema. He never drove a car and never used a typewriter. He thought television was pernicious. He didn’t like talking on the telephone, because he didn’t want his words violated by a tangle of wires.
Powys said: ‘A great modern novel consists of and ought to include just everything.’”
