Jessica

“[On Du Bois] Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears — prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympathetically by Emil Jannings. Piebald hands. Brilliant talker, with an old-world touch. Très gentilhomme. Smokes special Turkish cigarettes. Charming and distinguished in other, more important, ways. Told me that when he went to England he was listed as “Colonel” on the Channel boat, because his name bore the addition “Col.” on his passport.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971

“I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The only thing in this world is music–music and books and one or two pictures. I am going to found a colony where there shall be no marrying–unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven–no human element at all, except what comes through Art–nothing but ideal peace and endless meditation. The whole of human beings grows too complicated, my only wonder is that we don’t fill more madhouses: the insane view of life has much to be said for it–perhaps its the sane one after all: and we, the sad sober respectable citizens really rave every moment of our lives and deserve to be shut up perpetually. My spring melancholy is developing these hot days into summer madness.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Vol. One, 1888-1912

“He always finds himself face to face with the incomprehensible, inaccessible, the "language of the stone". And his only recourse is talking. This cannot be "literature". Literature belongs to those who are at home in the world. He can only talk in a simple--deceptively simple--way: circular, repetitive, insisting on the very gap between him and the world, between him and nature. He can only hope that out of his insistence will come a new language which can fill the gap and include the other side.”
― Rosemarie Waldrop, Collected Prose