“Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.”

― Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, 16 March 1926

​

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

​

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

― Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian

 

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

― My favorite lines from Tennyson's "Ulysses", full poem here

​

"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia..."​

― Borges to start one of the greatest short stories ever written, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

​

There's a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

― William Stafford

​​​

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

 

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.​

― A. E. Housman ​​​​​

​​

"More land in the nation was pulled into connection with other places during the mid-1800s than during the previous two and a half centuries, much of it during the fifteen years after the onset of Civil War. The most impressive accomplishments were in the lands added to the nation, just as those transformations were underway. The process redefined topology itself, at least in its practical realities. North America's western half lies naturally north and south. Its borderlands run up and down on a standard map, and so do its plains and open spaces, and most of its great rivers. The new systems of rails, wires, and roads took that orientation and wrenched it 90 degrees around. Now the dominant flow of people, things, and information was east to west. A continental American state was made in defiance of the continental grain. It would be difficult to overstate the consequences. New technologies created a kind of endoskeleton that permitted every broad change that followed, while giving shape to both an emerging region and an idea, the West. As they did, they would help bind its plains, mountains, and deserts even more broadly into a global pursuit of new understandings of the world, of its peoples, and of life itself."

― Elliott West in Continental Reckoning (2023)​