Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'f...oreign commerce' on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves--this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to s...eek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Next we come to the bronchial buster, or the man (it is usually a man) who, being in the throes of a terrific throat and tube trou...ble chooses that night for theater-going.... He will soon learn to pick his pauses with finesse. It does no good to cough while there is a great deal of noise going on on the stage. No one can hear. The time is just as the star is about to do a little low speaking to her dying lover or when the hero, alone in his garret, goes silently over to the fireplace and tears up the letter. There for a good rousing bark, my hearty, followed by a series of short sharp ones like those of a coxswain! If possible the appearance of apoplexy should be simulated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret-room... Piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold..., all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven an...d earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoug...hts about me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part... of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »