Jean Bowen

“What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.”
― Edith Wharton, The Decoration Of Houses

“Stand back. Forget what you read on the Internet. Attend to the tree before you. Observe the growth pattern of the tree. In Pruning, as in any good design, negative space plays an important role. Well-Pruned trees have an airy quality. Yuki Nara of the website Way of Maple says that a bird can fly through a well pruned Japanese maple- good standard for a fruit tree, too.”
― Ann Ralph, Grow a Little Fruit Tree: Simple Pruning Techniques for Small-Space, Easy-Harvest Fruit Trees

“I'm attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied. . .”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“This is a worrying recipe. Young bears (cubs will need about two and a half hours of cooking) might well still be attended by their mothers, who are notoriously irritable when anything threatens their offspring. Choose, rather, an old friendless bear and double the cooking time.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring