Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.