Sedulia's Quotations

Keats: To One who has been Long in City Pent

To One who has been Long in City Pent

To one who has been long in city pent,
'tis very sweet to look into the fair
and open face of heaven,--to breathe a prayer
full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart's content,
fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
and gentle tale of love and languishment?
Returning home at evening, with an ear
catching the notes of Philomel,--an eye
watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career,
he mourns that day so soon has glided by:
e'en like the passage of an angel's tear
that falls through the clear ether silently.

        --John Keats (1795-1821)

Ibsen's eidetic memory: "I see everything"

Once, when walking with a friend through a house they had never been in before, [Ibsen] turned suddenly and said, "What was in that room we just passed?" His friend had only the vaguest notion, but Ibsen gave a most exact description of everything in the room, its appearance, its location, its relation to everything else, and then said, under his breath, as if to himself, "I see everything."

        --Oliver Sacks (1933-), in Seeing Voices

Shelley: an alternation of sleeping and reading

The main pattern of Shelley's life was an alternation of sleeping and reading. He was, in fact, always fatigued from night reading, and had a habit of falling asleep by day, anywhere, suddenly, like a child. At Oxford he read about sixteen out of every twenty-four hours, his eyes always in a book when eating or when walking, whether in country lanes or on the streets....It was his habit at this time to read standing, where possible. Trelawney reported that he left Shelley at ten one morning, standing at the mantel in his study, reading, and returning at six found him in the same position still reading, looking pale and exhausted.

      

--# 1194, Fuller, 2500 Anecdotes for All Occasions

Bill Kuhus: New Orleans, the last vestige of the 19th century

New Orleans? What can you say about the world's greatest marshmallow? New Orleans is the last vestige of the nineteenth century in this country--something about New Orleans defies time. The word "corruption" becomes irrelevant in this city....New Orleans has a very easy sense of responsibility. Trying to arouse anything in New Orleans is like trying to find the muscle in a marshmallow....New Orleans lacks both the liberalism and the intelligence for constructive order....People come here to retire, even in their twenties and thirties...It's hard to find people doing serious work here....The people who live here are living under a heavier layer of delusions about themselves than any other people I know of. The incredible is absolutely, prosaically normal here...I think it is the most unreal outpost of American civilization; it stretches your sense of the ludicrous and inane, the unbelievable-- people living right at the edge of catastrophe.

        --Bill Kuhus, former New Orleans writer, quoted in the People's Directory, Fall 1973

Alfred Polgar: the destiny of emigrants

The emigrant's destiny: The foreign country has not become home, but home has become foreign.

Emigranten-Schicksal: Die Fremde ist nicht Heimat geworden. Aber die Heimat Fremde.

  --Alfred Polgar (1873-1955), Der Emigrant und die Heimat

Frank O'Connor: In 1932 Mother and I were travelling

In 1932 Mother and I were travelling by bus from Bantry. One of the passengers was a violent, cynical, one-legged man who began to beg, and the conductor was too afraid to interfere with him. I took an intense loathing to him and refused to give him money, but he was much less interested in me than in some members of a pipers'  band who were also travelling. He demanded that they should play for him, and when they merely looked out of the windows he began to imitate the bagpipes himself. After a time I realized that the bagpipes he was imitating were those he had heard during some battle in France fifteen years before. The bagpipes hypnotized him, and now he began imitating the sound of a German scouting plane, the big guns, the whistle of the shells, and as they fell silent he began to mutter in a low frenzied voice to someone who was beside him. "Hey, Jim! Give us a clip there, Jim! They're coming! Hurry! Jim, Jim!"  He reached over to shake someone and then started and sighed. Then he took an ammunition belt that was not there from the shoulders of someone who was long dead and slung it over his own, fitted a clip-- that gesture I knew so well-- into the heavy stick he carried and began to fire over the back of the seat. Suddenly he sprang into the air and fell in the centre of the bus, unconscious it seemed, and for some reason we were all too embarrassed to do anything. After a few minutes he groaned and reached out to touch his leg-- the one that wasn't there. Then he got to his feet and sat back in his seat perfectly silent. I have rarely been so ashamed of myself as I was that day.

       --Frank O'Connor (1903-1966)(real name Michael O'Donovan), My Father's Son (pub. 1968)

Hugo Hamilton: Ireland vs Germany

[The author's mother is German, his father Irish, and they live in Ireland]

She says it's hard to understand whats going on in people's heads in Ireland. She says Irish people dance with their heads and speak with their feet. Everybody knows what's inside everybody else's head, but nobody says it out loud. They like to keep everything inside. She says German people say what they think and Irish people keep it to themselves and maybe the Irish way is better. In Germany, she says, people think before they speak so that they mean what they say, while in Ireland, people think after they speak so as to find out what they mean. In Ireland the words never touch the ground.

        --Hugo Hamilton (1953- ), The Speckled People (pub. 2003)