Books Are A Refuge, A Sort Of

Not To Discriminate Every Moment Some Passionate Attitude In Those About Us, And In The Very Brilliancy Of Their Gifts Some Tragic Dividing Of Forces On Their Ways, Is, On This Short Day Of Frost And Sun, To Sleep Before Evening. With This Sense Of The Splendour Of Our Experience And Of Its Awful Brevity, Gathering All We Are Into One Desperate Effort To See And Touch, We Shall Hardly Have Time To Make Theories About The Things We See And Touch.

One Of The Most Beautiful Passages Of Rousseau Is That In The Sixth Book Of Confessions, Where He Describes The Awakening In Him Of The Literary Sense. Of Such Wisdom, The Poetic Passion, The Desire Of Beauty, The Love Of Art For Its Own Sake, Has Most.

A Certain Strangeness, Something Of The Blossoming Of The Aloe, Is Indeed An Element In All True Works Of Art: That They Shall Excite Or Surprise Us Is Indispensable.

The Base Of All Artistic Genius Is The Power Of Conceiving Humanity In A New, Striking, Rejoicing Way, Of Putting A Happy World Ofits Own Creation In Place Of The Meaner World Of Common Days, Of Generating Around Itself An Atmosphere With A Novel Power Of Refraction, Selecting, Transforming, Recombining The Images It Transmits, According To The Choice Of The Imaginative Intellect. In Exercising This Power, Painting And Poetry Have A Choice Of Subject Almost Unlimited.

All Art Constantly Aspires To The Condition Of Music....in Its Ideal, Consummate Moments, The End Is Not Distinct From The Means, The Form From The Matter, The Subject From The Expression; They Inhere In And Completely Saturate Each Other.