One, a poet, went babbling like a fountain
Through parks. All were jokes to children.
All had the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants
Exposed to a too violent sun.
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"Exiles From Their Land, History Their Domicile"
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"The Uncreating Chaos"Stephen Spender
» Stephen Spender - all quotes »
The poet needs to be deluded about his poems—for who can be sure that it is delusion? In his strongest hours the public hardly exists for the writer; he does what he ought to do, has to do, and if afterwards some Public wishes to come and crown him with laurel crowns, well, let it! if critics wish to tell people all that he isn’t, well, let them—he knows what he is. But at night when he can’t get to sleep it seems to him that it is what he is, his own particular personal quality, that he is being disliked for. It is this that the future will like him for, if it likes him for anything; but will it like him for anything? The poet’s hope is in posterity, but it is a pale hope; and now that posterity itself has become a pale hope...
Randall Jarrell
Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, is nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain.
Aga Khan III
Fountain heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves.John Fletcher
America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.
Walter Abish
On stare decisis (adhering to judicial precedent): The Court's reliance upon stare decisis can best be described as contrived. It insists upon the necessity of adhering not to all of Roe, but only to what it calls the 'central holding.' It seems to me that stare decisis ought to be applied even to the doctrine of stare decisis, and I confess never to have heard of this new, keep-what-you-want-and-throw-away-the-rest version.
Antonin Scalia
Spender, Stephen
Spengler, Oswald
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