The Paris Review

Thoor Ballylee, Co. Galway. Once owned by W.B. Yeats

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” —W. B. Yeats

“[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement―not incitement.” —Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: A Romance

“I’m not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?” —Maurice Sendak, 2004

“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.” ―Thomas Mann

—Keeping Up With Teen-Agers, by Evelyn Millis Duvall, 1947. Via Questionable Advice.

“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.” —Adrienne Rich, from “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”