For The Love of Lit

A blog about books & book stores

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Taliesin West

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Writers at the National Portrait Gallery

Bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Daniel Chester French, Edgar Allan Poe by Samuel Stillman Osgood, Nathaniel Hawthorne by Emanuel Gottlieb, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Thomas Buchanan Read

Edith Wharton by Edward Harrison May

Henry James by Jacques-Camille Blanche

Toni Morrison by Robert McCurdy

Jhumpa Lahriri by Raymond Elman

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Politics & Prose in DC

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The George Peabody Library in Baltimore

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In the neighborhood that inspired the work of Anne Rice: New Orleans’ Garden District

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Largely internal, wholly original, and wonderfully strange: Ali Smith’s How To Be Both

“the life of painting and making is a matter of double knowledge so that your own hands will reveal a world to you which your mind’s eye, your conscious eye, is often blind.”

“In this particular ring of purgatorium I long right now for that smell of home, the smell of the horse I travelled the earth with and the horse who travelled it with me, with the dividing line of whiter hairs from his forehead down to the soft dark of his nostril, cause he was a creature of symmetries and a reminder that nature is herself a bona fide artist of intent both dark and light.”

“But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.”

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During these few months this overweight child has turned into a slender man with pectoral rosebuds on his chest, sweating, smiling at himself in the glass, and I yelp aloud because of the swiftness of youth, these gorgeous changes that insist that not everything is decaying faster than we can love it.

Lauren Groff, "Ghosts and Empties" The New Yorker

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A fairly young, intelligent looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.

Werner Herzog "Conquest of the Useless"

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It’s not the opposable thumb that separates us from the beasts, it’s our facility with language.

Chris Offutt, "Trash Food" Oxford American

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I could read here for a while

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And all I can think is that I would never have done that to you, walked out like that. And all I can think then is that maybe that's what's wrong with me. You have learned something I don't want to know.

Colm Tóibín, “Sleep”

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"Did he who made the lamb make thee?" The Tyger, William Blake