Kenneth

“In the destructive element immerse.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“It is speech which contains all our childhood fantasies, all our primitive and original impulses, our horror shows, our “mother-meanings,” and whatever trips past the Forms we may have taken. And it is the sound of these early words, in the total context of their production, which gives them their emotional power, and connects them so closely with our basic desires.*12 The dark horse is stabled in the child. So the poet, the rhetorician, the philosopher, who thinks of a page as merely a page, and not as a field for the voice; who considers print to be simply print, and does not notice the notes it forms; whose style is disheveled and overcharged with energy or overrun with feeling, or whose frigid and compulsive orderings make the mouth dry; the author who is satisfied to see his words, as though at a distance like sheep on a hillside, and not as concepts coasting like clouds across his consciousness—such a writer will never enter, touch, or move the soul; never fill us with the feeling that he’s seen the Forms, whether or not there are any; never give us that ride up the hill of heaven as Plato has, or the sense that in accepting his words we are accepting a vision.”
― William H Gass, The William H. Gass Reader

“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifetimes as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. "Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life....Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.”
― John Ashbery