Quotes from James Merrill

And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.

Always that same old story—Father Time and Mother Earth,A marriage on the rocks.

Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry.

I yearned for the kind of unseasoned telling foundIn legends, fairy tales, a tone licked cleanOver the centuries by mild old tongues,Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.

Proust's Law (are you listening?) is twofold:(a) What least thing our self-love longs for mostOthers instinctively withhold;(b) Only when time has slain desireIs his wish granted to a smiling ghostNeither harmed nor warmed, now, by the fire.

I knewThat life was fiction in disguise.

Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.

What we dream up must be lived down, I think.

And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.

he preferslive music to a patron's humdrum spheresIs this permitted? when u are mozart yesHe's living now? As what? a black rock starwhatever that is.

Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.

But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.

He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline.

In life, there are no perfect affections.

The simplest science book is over my head.

Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.

At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw.

I'd like to think the scientists need us - but do they? Did Newton need Blake?

The day is breaking someone else's heart.

Freedom to be oneself is all very well; the greater freedom is not to be oneself.

Nor do I try to keep a garden, only An avocado in a glass of water -- Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later, When the small gilt leaves have grown Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes, And start another. I am earth's no less.

Let the mind be, along with countless other things, a landing strip for sacred visitations.

The sky is realest: the sky cannot Be touched and in the mirror it cannot Be touched. He is enchanted. The rare azur Is flawless; happily blurred blue is no whit Less exquisite than blue unblurred. And what He misses he would never know was there.

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece? But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation And every bit of us is lost in it (Or found — I wander through the ruin of S Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness) And in that loss a self-effacing tree, Color of context, imperceptibly Rustling with its angel, turns the waste To shade and fiber, milk and memory.