Artful Quotes (page 68)
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--- No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a...
John Keats
In Mexico, I first encountered the attitude that was missing from the optimistic sense of living in the United States: a tragic sense of life. Such a sense doesn’t force us into a somber cone of depression and futility; it urges the opposite. The tragic sense opens a human being to the exuberant joys of the present. To laughter, carnal ity, the comical varieties of love, to music and art, to the small human glories of the day.
Pete Hamill