'My mind will be a treasure-house of art, swept and garnished and strong and at its best.'

- Mary MacLane (I Await the Devil's Coming, 1902).

Picture: "Art Lover" cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post by Stevan Dohanos (3rd March 1956).

The old man heard
A crying against his knee and looked down at the eyes
Of his hound-bitch; he said, "You are wrong, Snap-
per. It is no harm. We shall have less distraction
now.
Death and departure are not evil things. I tell you sadly,
every person that leaves
A place, improves it: the mourners at every funeral know
that
In their shamed hearts: and when the sociable races of
man and dog are done with, what a shining wonder
This world will be."

- Robinson Jeffers, from "The Double Axe, Part II: The Inhumanist" (1948).

Picture: Illustration by Ksawery Kozminski from "Tales & Legends From Poland" by Julie Laguirande-Duval (1929).

"...it needs a truly foul day to hear the music fair."
- Harry Mathews (The Conversions, 1962)

Picture: Illustration by Franklin Booth from an advertisement for Estey Organs in House & Garden (October 1922).

Ray Morimura.

"It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!"

- Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

Picture: Illustration from "Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises of the Western North Atlantic: A Guide to their Identification" by Stephen Leatherwood, David K. Caldwell, and Howard E. Winn (1976)

"All at first was the fremitus of things, the jigger of gnats, drum of the blood, fidget of leaves, shiver of light, boom of the wind. The tremor of my cry may have had something to do with choosing this threshold. There are other sills, empty places with intolerable glare, presences, noon quiet, lonely desperate desert wastes. I have died again in them. Those who go to the inhuman to place their hopes upon its alien rhythms, its bitter familiarity with nothing, its constant retreat from all that we can love, are hostages to vastation."

- Guy Davenport (C. Musonius Rufus)

Picture: Illustration from the Saturday Evening Post, unknown artist.

"All the ancient heroic virtues you unpack have lost their importance long ago, you know it yourself. Thanks for some wonderful impressions. Sleep well."

- Robert Walser (Institute Benjamenta)

Picture: From Dino Buzzati's "Poema a Fumetti" (1969)

"No one sees me changing. But who sees me? I am my own hiding place."

- Joë Bousquet (poem found in Bachelard's "The Poetics of Reverie")

Picture: Richard Henry Benson molding his face - Justice Inc #3 (1975) Jack Kirby and Mike Royer.

There is a sacred, secret line in loving

which attraction and even passion cannot cross,—

even if lips draw near in awful silence

and love tears at the heart.

Friendship is weak and useless here,

and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,

because the soul is free and does not know

the slow luxuries of sensual life.

Those who try to come near it are insane

and those who reach it are shaken by grief,

So now you know exactly why

my heart beats no faster under your hand.

- Anna Akhmatova

Picture: Illustration by Robert Fawcett (Cosmopolitan, 1954)

"Can we not admit certain skilled men, gifted with intelligence, talent or even genius and so indespensable to society, rather than stagnate should be free to disobey laws in certain cases?"

 - Michel (Bresson's Pickpocket)

Picture: Illustration from "Survival in the City" (1974)