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2025

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Jan 2025

1^st January

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush (1900)

8^th January

You were the kind that is so scared of life that you only know how to despise it, for fear you might be tricked into liking something that wasn't up to the standards of a handful of people you admired

Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (1975)

15^th January

I’m happier with writers who, perhaps suffering less from the famous “anxiety of influence,” have enough sense of their own worth to appreciate their predecessors and fellow-workers in the saltmines of literature. The whole history of a literature and of every genre within it is a chain of influences, inventions shared, discoveries made common, techniques adopted and adapted. Must I say again that this has absolutely nothing to do with copying texts, with stealing stuff?

Ursula K Le Guin, Art, Information, Theft, and Confusion, Part Two, 1 August 2010

22^nd January

But robo art did not take off. Art has always thrived on biography – it exists in every piece like a watermark.... There was no madness in the robo artists, no sawn-off ears or suicide, no history.

Sam Mills, The Watermark (2024)

29^th January

This experience made me say to myself, "If a Roman woman had, some years before the sack of Rome, realised why it was going to be sacked and what motives inspired the barbarians and what the Romans, and had written down all she knew and felt about it, the record would have been of value to historians. My situation, though probably not so fatal, is as interesting." Without doubt it was my duty to keep a record of it.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942)

Feb 2025

5^th February

People were still not pretending that they wanted to dash out and die for their country, which as late as that seemed a useless thing to do, God forgive us; but there was a great deal of altruism left, notwithstanding the sneers of the perpetual critics to whom mankind is such a poor thing you wonder they can bear themselves.

Margery Allingham, The Oaken Heart (1941)

12^th February

The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define..... The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts, little is left but a bunch of words.

E M Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)

19^th February

People who find their lives getting complicated tend to do things which will complicate them still further, under the impression that they're doing the exact opposite.

Desmond Cory, Stranglehold (1961)

26^th February

[I]f success is the goal, it seems clear to me that the fast track is headed the wrong way. Think of the people who are genuinely successful--pathbreaking scientists, best-selling novelists.... They are not, on the whole, the kind of people who keep glancing shiftily at their watches or making small lists titled "To Do"." On the contrary, many of these people appear to be in a daze.... These truly successful people are childlike, easily distractable, fey sorts[.]

Barbara Ehrenreich, 'The Cult of Busyness' (1985), in Had I Known: Collected Essays (2020)

Mar 2025

5^th March

[O]nly those who have never tried it for a week or two can suppose that the pursuit of knowledge does not demand a strength and determination, a resolve not to be beaten, that is a special kind of energy[.]

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1982)

12^th March

Fran is so deeply incapable of seeing herself in a powerful position that, when she is involved in a tricky situation such as this, she is not good at discerning obsequious mannerisms or the gradations of subservience. She is always ready to put herself in the wrong, and in this instance has succeeded very thoroughly in so doing.

Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises (2016)

19^th March

[E]verybody feels like an outsider. Even the most elegant of us, the most poised – everybody, some of the time anyway, feels as if they’re being looked at and poorly judged, and speaking weird and dressing wrong.

Eva Wiseman, Art, Leigh Bowery and the weaponisation of embarrassment. The Observer, 9 March 2025

26^th March

I'm aware that all such forms of consensus about "great" books and "perennial" problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of "what is already known."

Susan Sontag, 'The Salmagundi interview', 1975, in On Women (2023)

Apr 2025

2^nd April

Talent is rare and genius rarer still, but the chances are that it is still as evenly distributed as anything else across a given population. It is the opportunities to exercise it that are not.

Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Books Shape Our Lives (2025)

9^th April

I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some 'ordinary' world into which it is possible at will to wander.

Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (1955)

16^th April

Here in his hands the power—here in his head and heart the desire, and between a barrier that he could not surmount. He could not wish to paint "beautiful" pictures because he meant his own "beautiful" when he said the word, and he had not yet made it. Plainly he could not wish for that which had not yet become. His "beautiful" was growing inside of him. When achieved it would be the sum of what he had thought and felt and could think and feel.

Norman H Matson, Flecker's Magic (1926)