The world is a wilderness, in which we may indeed get our station changed, but the move will be out of one wilderness station unto another.

      --Thomas Boston, quoted by Alice Munro in her story "A Wilderness Station"


What man so wise, what earthly wit so ware,
As to descry the crafty cunning train
By which Deceit doth mask in visor fair,
And cast her colors dyed deep in grain
To seem like Truth, whose shape she well can feign.

     --Sir Edmund Spenser, from The Faerie Queen


And after pain, the calm--dark records on dark shelves:
Some notion of romance we never got over,
Some sweet past theme we kept trying to recover,
Some concept of ourselves as more than our lost selves.

     --Joe Bolton, from "Prelude: Late Twentieth-Century Piece"


Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction.

     --Flannery O'Connor, from "The Nature and Aim of Fiction"


Six years of such small preoccupations!
Six years of shuttling in and out of this place!
O my hunger! My hunger!
I could have gone around the world twice
or had new children--all boys.
It was a long trip with little days in it
and no new places.

     --Anne Sexton, from "Flee on Your Donkey"