When God's hand is bent to strike, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Sorrowful words become the sorrowful; angry words suit the passionate; light words a playful expression; serious words suit the grave.
[Lat., Tristia maestum
Vultum verba decent; iratum, plena minarum;
Ludentem, lasciva: severum, seria dictu.]
Laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment.
Almost every cartoonist, when he's sitting down to draw a funny face, if you watch him closely, his mouth is gonna curl to the expression that he's drawing. But when I would write a story - I know it's going to sound almost ridiculous and infantile - I would, in a way, start living it.
There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineament loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared, that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.
It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.
When God's hand is bent to strike, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.