Commonplace Book

'"...what business have people to bring children into the world only to starve, or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliament against it! Oh, why - why is not one allowed to have a look into life before one is born - to have one's choice whether one will come into it at all or no? But, if one had, who would come? - who would?"

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXIII)

Commonplace Book

'Mr. Keats, whose poetry you enquire after, appears to me what I have already said: such writing is a sort of mental ****-******** his Imagination. I don't mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state, which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium...'

from a letter to John Murray, dated November 9, 1820, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Commonplace Book

'The biographer has made a botch of your life - calling your father "a venerable old gentleman", and prattling of "Addison", and "dowager countesses". If that damned fellow was to write my life, I would certainly take his...'

from a letter to Thomas Moore, dated June 9, 1820, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Commonplace Book

'...Oh, ye liars! all ye that say sleep and death are alike! what kinship is there between the pliant relaxer of soft limbs, the light brief slumber, that, at any trivial noise, a trumpeting gnat or distant calling voice, flies and is dissolved, and the grave stiff whiteness of that profoundest rest that no thousand booming cannons, no rock-rending earthquake, no earth-riving thunderbolt can break? It is an insult to that strong narcotic to liken any other repose to that he gives...'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XX)

Commonplace Book

'...Their moral is not your moral; their life is not your life; you would not understand it: it is not English, nor French, nor German, which you would all understand. The Conventual education, the Cavalier Servitude, the habits of thought and living are so entirely different, and the difference becomes so much more striking the more you live intimately with them, that I know not how to make you comprehend a people, who are at once temperate and profligate, serious in their character and buffoons in their amusements, capable of impressions and passions, which are at once sudden and durable (what you find in no other nation), and who actually have no society (what we would call so), as you may see by their Comedies: they have no real comedy, not even in Goldoni; and that is because they have no Society to draw it from.'

from a letter to John Murray, dated February 21, 1820, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Commonplace Book

'...Well, if every one in England wept for every one else's sorrows, the noise of tears and sobbings would drown the whirring of all the mills in Leeds and Manchester - the booming of all the cannon at Shoeburyness.'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XIX)

Commonplace Book

'...Was he ever in a Turkish bath, that marble paradise of sherbet and Sodomy?...'

from a letter to John Murray dated August 12, 1819, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Commonplace Book

'We were in a first-floor room at the far end of a two-storey stucco building of just discernible shabbiness and melancholy: something in the very jauntiness of the sign Days Inn Vacancies exuded this air of shabbiness and melancholy. In books there is said to be meaning, in our English class our teacher was reading poems by Robert Frost to us and it was astonishing to me, and a little scary, how the words of a poem have such meaning, but in actual life, in places like the Days Inn motel there is not much meaning, it is just something that is...'

from Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (Chapter 24)