• John Donne

    The Sun Rising

    Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
    Why dost thou thus,
    Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
    Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
    Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
    Late school-boys and sour prentices,
    Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
    Call country ants to harvest offices;
    Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
    Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

    Thy beams so reverend, and strong
    Why shouldst thou think?
    I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
    But that I would not lose her sight so long.
    If her eyes have not blinded thine,
    Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
    Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
    Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
    Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
    And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”

    She’s all states, and all princes I;
    Nothing else is;
    Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
    All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
    Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
    In that the world’s contracted thus;
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
    To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
    Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
    This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

    Today is the anniversary of John Donne’s death in 1631

  • Clive James

    The book of my enemy has been remaindered
    And I am pleased
    In vast quantities it has been remaindered.

  • Stephen Donaldson

    This you have to understand. There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.

  • Wole Soyinka

    I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.

  • Jiddu Krishnamurti

    The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain.

  • Christopher Morley

    Printer’s ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

  • E L Doctorow

    It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.