Brizna

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“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

“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

“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