Brizna

“On Sundays we rode about the country on branches of trees, each with an ashplant for a sword, and tried to use the Malory diction. It was my last open make-believe before my adolescence, after which time, like everyone else, I lived half the time in fantasy, but craftily, deceiving both others and myself. This adult make-believe is something we have foolishly ignored.”
― Louis MacNeice, The Strings Are False

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Masters to a new boy are always impressive, gradually they shrink, begin to repeat themselves, their mannerisms stand out further and further like Pinnochio's nose, you realise that their intellect is static, you cease to care what they think of you, you write them off as mere 'bleaks', inhuman, bored and embittered.
A young master comes up fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, full of ideas and charm; after a few years the ideas shrivel away, the charm becomes a convention. In order to do their job well they have to become more or less mechanical. The nicest masters are the eccentrics, but these are eccentric before their time in a way which belongs to the old, have little tricks and crotchets dipped in a petrifying stream, spinsters and proud of it.”
― Louis MacNeice, The Strings Are False

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune