Cate Brecht

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“One summer night I fell asleep hoping the world would be different when I woke. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was the same.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems