“Virtue. . . ? The great house
With its servants
The great utensilled
House
Of air conditioners, safe harbor
In which the heart sinks, closes
Now like a fortress
In daylight, setting its weight
Against the bare blank paper.
2
The purpose
Of their days.
And their nights?
The evenings
And the candle light?
What could they mean by that?”
Oppen, George. “Guest Room.” New Collected Poems. Edited by Michael Davidson and Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 2008. p. 108.
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New Directions Books
“Even the green mesquite trees have long thorns set just at eye level. Much of the wildlife is nocturnal, and it creeps through the nights, poisonous and alien: the sidewinder, the rattlesnake, the scorpion, the giant centipede, the black widow, the tarantula, the brown recluse, the coral snake, the Gila monster.”
Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Devil’s Highway : a True Story 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown, 2004.
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Little, Brown and Company
“His is not viewing the equinox itself and where there are warm nights black liquid with no birds beside, the gelid frozen, thus double, yet glass days, their equal duration at once.”
Scalapino, Leslie. "Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows." The Brooklyn Rail, March 2007.
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The Brooklyn Rail
“Like Lionel Tollemache’s friend who played with his blade on his forehead, children hold their books on the knife edge of damage. But, like Mr. Lockwood, we stumble upon the hieroglyphs of boys and girls, and, if they give us dreams on sodden nights, they provide us, too, with spells for our scholarly imaginations.”
Lerer, Seth. "Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children's Marginalia." Representations 118, no. 1 (2012): 148-9. doi:10.1525/rep.2012.118.1.126.
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JSTOR
“Outside, the village’s features obliterated by snow. The nights long and starless, daytime brief, gloomy, the sun rarely out, and then only to make a cameo appearance before it vanished.”
Hosseini, Khaled. And the Mountains Echoed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. p. 29.
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Bloomsbury
"Evening succeeds evening.
Demons discourse
on familiar topics.
They describe a wraith’s response
to a description.
“I think he was signaling.”
One night
differs from all other nights
through their deployment
of synonyms.
“Craft a way forward.”
“Get out ahead
of this
with his plan.”"
Armantrout, Rae. “Lengths.” Versed. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009. muse.jhu.edu/book/1357. p. 48.
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“The bit of earth upon which I press my feet here and now and the larger earth that yields me food and drink, this ocean with its relentless power when goaded by winter storms, and with its heavenly peace and calm in its middle stretches under the summer’s tropical sun, the blue sky, the approaching night, and the night and the morning, the sun, the stars, the milky way, the grass, the trees, my animal companions, the wild birds, the barn-yard fowls, my dogs, the cattle, the horse, and above all my human friends, my colleagues in work, and my family—all these have for me a reality that no disorder or dimness of mind (unless indeed, these go to the point of swoon or delirium) or no speculative sophistication can strip them of.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. p. 131.
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Google Books
“The bit of earth upon which I press my feet here and now and the larger earth that yields me food and drink, this ocean with its relentless power when goaded by winter storms, and with its heavenly peace and calm in its middle stretches under the summer’s tropical sun, the blue sky, the approaching night, and the night and the morning, the sun, the stars, the milky way, the grass, the trees, my animal companions, the wild birds, the barn-yard fowls, my dogs, the cattle, the horse, and above all my human friends, my colleagues in work, and my family—all these have for me a reality that no disorder or dimness of mind (unless indeed, these go to the point of swoon or delirium) or no speculative sophistication can strip them of.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. p. 131.
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Google Books
“I do not suppose Professor Richards would, if pressed to elucidate his words, affirm his belief in a time when the ‘earth was waste and void’ in the Mosaic sense and when there existed, ‘… a dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, and time and place are lost; where eldest night and Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy.’ Even the less exuberantly fanciful Chaos of Hesiod held to be a ‘yawning abyss composed of Void, Mass, and Darkness,’ could hardly appeal to the curbed and guided imagination of present-day science.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. pp. 39-40. (Richards, T.W. “The Fundamental Properties of the Elements.” Nature 87, 29–32 (1911).
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Google Books
"When the first heavy storms stopped work on the high mountains, I made haste down to my Yosemite den, not to "hole up" and sleep the white months away; I was out every day, and often all night, sleeping but little, studying the so-called wonders and common things ever on show, wading, climbing, sauntering among the blessed storms and calms, rejoicing in almost everything alike that I could see or hear: the glorious brightness of frosty mornings; the sun beams pouring over the white domes and crags into the groves and waterfalls, kindling marvelous iris fires in the hoarfrost and spray; the great forests and mountains in their deep noon sleep; the good-night alpenglow; the stars; the solemn gazing moon, drawing the huge domes and headlands one by one glowing white out of the shadows hushed and breathless like an audience in awful enthusiasm, while the meadows at their feet sparkle with frost-stars like the sky; the sublime darkness of storm-nights, when all the lights are out; the clouds in whose depths the frail snow-flowers grow; the behavior and many voices of the different kinds of storms, trees, birds, waterfalls, and snow avalanches in the ever-changing weather.”
Muir, John. The Writings of John Muir: Sierra Edition. Vol. II. The Mountains of California. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917. pp. 168-9.
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Internet Archive
“Wishes
I’ll twist sunlight into
Words for the walk over
To the blank. Thoughts
Are things. Thoughtless streets
Pass nights outdoors. Syllables
Aim to spread out,
But hardly do. Wet,
Washed, shined tracks set
In city mud. Tunes
In mind sound, hassled,
Filagrees honoring live seconds.
Who woves those ropes
You’re climbing back
To the minute you
Set the sky up
As an equal.”
Perelman, Bob. “Wishes.” Primer. Oakland, CA: This Press, 1981. p. 24.
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Internet Archive