“…separate, perfect immovable
Images can break the solitude
Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.”

- William Butler Yeats

And here’s a photograph from the book.

If you like this, go here.

Slightly related: What do you call those quotes that often are found after the title page of the book but before the substance?

Update: Epigraph. Thx Alex.

Saw this quote (originally in the Guardian) in an email from a friend:

“If one candidate is trying to scare you, and the other’s trying to get you to think; if one is appealing to your fears, and the other is appealing to your hopes — it seems to me you ought to vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.”

Bill Clinton, 10/26/04 while campaigning for Senator Kerry (link)

A wonderful description of the writing process:

Writing is a job, like plumbing is a job. There are days when all you do is screw words together like pipes, make the joints as tight as you can, and then flush shit through it to see if it leaks.

I think this quote struck particularly close to home because I have been spending quite a bit of time drafting agreements, and this describes that process to a tee.

Read the rest of Derek’s post entitled How to Write a Book in Three Easy Steps.

On a recommendation from Sheila, I recently read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It really captured my imagination. Much of the book is told from the perspective of a 9 year-old New Yorker with an over active imagination:

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

I absolutely love those last two lines.

In the wake of David Foster Wallace’s piece on Federer in yesterday’s NYTimes, the paper is allowing readers to share their thoughts on whether Federer is the best tennis player ever to play the sport. Kudos to William Tapia who got the first comment in:

“I like to watch tennis and this is a beautiful sport, but this is not a proper or interesting subject for comment at a moment of turnoil and war in some parts of the world. A discussion on the Middle East would be more suitable and is on our mids [Sic] now.”

I love the idea of passing through the exact center of your life - that there might be the faintest sensation…

And much thanks to Luke who gave me Nine Horses, which contains the poem below.

Tipping Point
By Billy Collins

At home, the jazz station plays all day,
so sometimes it becomes indistinct,
like the sound of rain,
birds in the background, the surf of traffic.

But today I heard a voice announce
that Eric Dolphy, 36 when he died,
has now been dead for 36 years.

I wonder—
did anyone sense something
when another Eric Dolphy lifetime
was added to the span of his life,

when we all took another
full Dolphy step forward in time,
flipped over the Eric Dolphy yardstick once again?

It would have been so subtle—
like the sensation you might feel
as you passed through the moment

at the exact center of your life
or as you crossed the equator at night in a boat.

I never gave it another thought,
but could that have been the little shift
I sensed a while ago
as I walked down in the rain to get the mail?

I love when a single line brings up a movie of visions in mind. That’s what this line did for me. Thanks Tim. Read the whole thing here.