Quotes from Susan Stewart

The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.

And it is in this gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire arises. The nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss.

Someone is always at the door, no one is ever there.

And if I'm homesick it's a window shrouded with ice where a young girl traces a name on the glass that's beginning to look like my name. It's the sky taking shape before me in the silence like a ghost who makes nothing come true.

This bourgeois conjunction of sign and signified is apparent in the dramatic rescue of the classics offered in advertisements for gilt-and-leather volumes of "The World's Greatest Literature.