S.L. Wallace Quotes

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

God is in me or else is not at all.

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.

One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice

How red the rose that is the soldier

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

The mind can never be satisfied.

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Wagamama. Text messaging aficionados might like to note that this is one of the most satisfying words you can possibly type.

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

You get to decide what to worship.

What a terrible thing, I thought, to let a moment go.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

It's astonishing what you learn and feel and see along the way. That's why a reporter's job, as you know, is such a joy.

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

Even a liberal reporter is a patriot, wants the best for this country. And people, your fair and balanced friends at Fox, don't fully understand that.

The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.

I certainly think that the best book in the world would owe the most to a good index, and the worst book, if it had but a single good thought in it, might be kept alive by it.

Who is this before whose presence idols tumble to the sod? While he cries out — Allah Akbar! and there is no god but God!

It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature.

Even if I could not earn a penny from my writing, I would earn my livelihood at something else and continue to write at night.

The darkness has departed and the night stars have passed by, you have touched my life like never before and I cannot stop thanking God for you in my life. Have a great day!