Bethany

“Touch has a memory," Will. Your man Keats said that.

Did he, now? Will looked up.

He did. If it had fit into his poem, I think he would have said taste and smell and sound have a memory, too.

Say more.

What more is there to say? He said what I've been saying. Aesthetics matter. Place matters. Our senses remember and replay these things back to us, to our fingers, or our nostrils, or our tongues."

(Conversation between Will and Joe.)”
― Will Willingham

“Reading poetry on the page is nice, Will. But it’s not all it could be. Reading it aloud—or hearing it read—gives it another dimension. It’s as though vocalizing the words completes the poem.”
― Will Willingham, Adjustments

“Poetry could surely slow a guy down.”
― Will Willingham, Adjustments

“He harbored a hidden inclination toward poetry but in the hard boiled world of adjusting, reading a sonnet seemed like something that could get a guy killed. It was perfect, Ben had told him. Like a book with a compartment cut out of the pages to hide a flask of whiskey, this one also let a guy hide a secret vice: the cover was bound upside down. So he could read the book, and if anyone saw him, it would look like he was posing.

Plausible deniability.”
― Will Willingham, Adjustments