The Verb Agreement

Life itself is a quotation

[theverbagreement]

“Wizards,” said the wizard mournfully, “always live in threes, for they are burdened with terrible secrets.” -Claire Legrand

[theverbagreement]

“Some love is fire: some love is rust:

But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.

And their lust was tremendous. It had the feel

Of hammers clanging; and stone; and steel:

And torches of the savage, roaring kind

That rip through iron, and strike men blind:

Of long trains crashing through caverns under

Grey trembling streets, like angry thunder:

Of engines throbbing; and hoarse steam spouting;

And feet tramping; and great crowds shouting.

A lust so savage, they could have wrenched

The flesh from bone, and not have blenched.”

—Joseph Moncure March, The Wild Party

[theverbagreement]

“It’s almost like a painter needs a border, a poet needs a beat.” —Jason Guriel, Forgotten Work

[theverbagreement]

“It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.” -Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

[theverbagreement]

“Even those of us who have not been spoiled by any athletic triumphs of our own and the fulfillment of the wild expectations of our early youth are aware of a humdrum, twilight quality to all our doings of middle life, however successful they may prove to be. There is a loss of light and ease and early joy, and we look to other exemplars—mentors and philosophers: grown men—to sustain us in that loss.” —Roger Angell, “Distance”

[theverbagreement]

“A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.” -Michael Chabon, Summerland

[theverbagreement]

“For those prone to boredom, baseball is excruciating; but for those who relish stillness, it is exquisite. Those long lulls, anathema to the always stimulated, provide the ideal setting for building relationships. Baseball is the backdrop for self-discovery.” —Brad Bulukjian

[theverbagreement]

“It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind.” —Brian Aldiss

[theverbagreement]

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.l

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

[theverbagreement]

“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”

Leonard Cohen, “The Favorite Game”

[theverbagreement]

“DAWN, n. The time when men of reason go to bed.”

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

[theverbagreement]

The muses come out at midnight.

Quincy Jones, ‘Quincy Jones has a story about that’

[theverbagreement]

We can lose ourselves in forests of fairy tales

Oliver Jeffers, A Child of Books

[theverbagreement]

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.

Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac

[theverbagreement]

There is a tendency to think of nature as separate from the modern world in which we live and work. It is somewhere – or something – grand and remote that must be travelled to, far beyond the urban sprawl. But here in the edges, less than half a mile from town, there are riches waiting to be discovered. Edge-lands provide brief portals into other worlds; to walk into them is to be delivered time and again into the possibility of escape; escape from the constrictions of our human world, perhaps even ourselves. We may – like the land in spring – experience our own renewal.

Rob Cowen, Hares on Easter Day

[theverbagreement]

Every young man's story should have a bookshop.

Matthew Pearl

[theverbagreement]

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

Ray Bradbury