"Words Belong to Each Other"

Here's a gem from Brainpickings. Listen to Virginia Woolf  ( in that amazing, long-vanished accent) talking about craft.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/04/29/craftsmanship-virginia-woolf-speaks-1937/

What I Keep Taped To My Computer Screen

WRITE WITH VELOCITY!

About Running After Ideas

You just say, "Well, hell, I don't need depression. I don't need worry. I don't need to push." The ideas will follow me. When they're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them.

Ray Bradbury, 1982, from Zen in the Art of Writing

Word of the Day

Sensuist: One who delights in the senses.

Not to be confused with Sensualist, someone devoted to physical pleasure (esp. sexual), though there is certainly overlap.

Desert Places By Robert Frost

Desert Places

By Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Bright Star By John Keats

Bright Star

By John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
        Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
        Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
        Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
        Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
        Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
        Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

A Dream Within a Dream

By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?