Springs Quotes (page 27)
Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward through the constant pastiche and basic fakery of any fiction not fed by the springs of memory -- what Henry James calls (in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett) the "fatal cheapness [and] mere escamotage" of the "'historic' novel."From the author's introduction to the signed first edition.
John Updike
All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It’s like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.
Truman Capote
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend. On on another, as Logos depends. On Eros, day on night, the imagined. On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace. And forth the particulars of rapture come. Music falls on the silence like a sense. A passion that we feel, not understand. Morning and afternoon are clasped together. And North and South are an intrinsic couple. And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers. That walk away together as one in...
Wallace Stevens
London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract.
E. M. Forster
[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
A. Bartlett Giamatti