Air Quotes (page 21)
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This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in? an interesting hole I find myself in? fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright,...
Douglas Adams
I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
Arthur Conan Doyle
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
Wallace Stegner
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.
Virginia Woolf
And what more am I? I look for aid to the imagination. [But how mistakenly!] I am not that assemblage of limbs we call the human body; I am not a subtle penetrating air distributed throughout all these members; I am not a wind, a fire, a vapor, a breath or anything at all that I can image. I am supposing all these things to be nothing. Yet I find, while so doing, that I am still assured that I am a something.
Rene Descartes
Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field, and forest, as they were. Reflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behind. In ashes, yet with hopes that she, Re-born from holy poverty, In lenten lands, hereafter may. Resume them on her Easter Day."(Epitaph for Joy Gresham)
C. S. Lewis
Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just...
Margaret Atwood
Near the snow, near the sun , in the highest field. See how those names are feted by the wavering grass, And by the streamers of white cloud, And whispers of wind in the listening sky; The names of those who in their lives have fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre. Born of the sun they traveled a short while towrads the sun. And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Stephen Spender