Quotes from Louis Bayard

After all these years, his best friend is malaria. Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.

Books, Mr. Landor!" "I do read, yes." Not much of a library—a scant three rows in all—but mine. Poe's fingers glided along the bindings.

I'm sure many have spoken of her." Lincoln reached for his pen, dipped it in the inkwell. "She is Elizabeth Edwards' sister." "For which she has my sympathies.

What is a holy mass, Tom, if not a play? A wedding? A coronation? do you wish to know why I am a playmaker? Because I know that, at every moment, we are in the midst of some play. Only in an arena that calls itself theater may we stand outside the real theater - our lives - and we see them in all their truth, Tom. By which, if course, I mean their tragedy.

I answered that quite to the contrary, I considered Death—and in particular, the death of a beautiful woman—to be Poetry's grandest, most exalted theme.

Only when someone becomes vital do we try to give that first encounter the importance it would later have

Fright being, in its way, as communicable a disorder as leprosy, I soon felt my own heart pound, my own limbs stiffen

I replied that to the contrary, it was my belief that the Highlands, to be apprehended in the full extent of their glory, must be seen immediately after the fall of the leaf, for neither Summer's verdancy nor Winter's rime can then conceal the minutest objects from the eye. Vegetation, I told her, does not improve, but rather obstructs, God's originating design.

will say this. He gets less ugly with time.

I had come to a new way of thinking about time. It's not the hard and fixed thing we imagine it to be, no, it's something soft and pleated, and under extreme pressure, it folds

A lady is in the newspaper but three times in her life. When she is born—" "When she marries and when she dies

There are times," I declared, "when I believe the dead haunt us because we love them too little. We forget them, you see; we don't mean to, but we do.

So as not to be murdered twice over. "Other times," I continued, "I believe we love them too much. And as a consquence they are never free to depart, because we carry them, our most deeply beloved, within ourselves. Never dead, never silent, never appeased.

Why is it, Mr. Poe, that I would sooner spend an hour with you in the"—again she laughed—"in the gloomiest contemplations than spend another minute speaking of dresses and baubles and the things that make most people happy?

I hide myself within my flower, That wearing on your breast, You, unsuspecting, wear me too— And angels know the rest. I hide myself within my flower, That, fading from your vase, You, unsuspecting, feel for me Almost a loneliness. —Emily Dickinson