The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America.... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.
When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.
Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
lost bride and her groom.
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable soddingrotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed.
When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder.
I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing.