Derrick Hassanein

“Mead.
O sweet elixir,
Ye bless the lips and steal the wits.
 ”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Paul’s last grain of hope falling to the ground below him.”
― Molly Arbuthnott, Peanut the Hamster

“The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“My heart aches, a drowsy numbness pains as if of hemlock I had drunk."

Ode To A NIghtengale, John Keats”
― Barbara Sontheimer