John Hall Wheelock quotes

“It's almost two societies, the living and the dead, and you live with them both.”
-- John Hall Wheelock

#Two Quotes

“The job of an editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world.”
-- John Hall Wheelock

#Jobs Quotes #Publishing House Quotes #Editors Quotes

“Most writers are in a state of gloom a good deal of the time; they need perpetual reassurance.”
-- John Hall Wheelock

#Needs Quotes #Reassurance Quotes #States Quotes

“A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows.”
-- John Hall Wheelock

Source : John Hall Wheelock (1963). “What is Poetry?”

#Children Quotes #Language Quotes #Speak Quotes

“But Piglet is so small that he slips into a pocket, where it is very comfortable to feel him when you are not quite sure whether twice seven is twelve or twenty-two.”

“There are two ways of getting out of a trial. One is simply to try to get rid of the trial, and be thankful when it is over. The other is to recognize the trial as a challenge from God to claim a larger blessing than we have ever had, and to hail it with delight as an opportunity of obtaining a larger measure of divine grace.”

“On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.”

“If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it.”

“In the middle of nowhere, along a quiet stretch of road, the diner dreamt of the hungry dead. And of two men.”

Source : A. Lee Martinez (2006). “Gil's All Fright Diner”, p.7, Macmillan

“Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.”

Source : A. Whitney Brown (1991). “The Big Picture: An American Commentary”, Harper Perennial

“Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic—that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is of course strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins.”

“I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.”

“If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.”

“I think there are two ways to depict a family. One is what it's really like, and one is what the audience would like it to be. Between you and me, I think the second one is what I would prefer.”