Source: A Wrinkle in Time
“O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is little fault!”
Canto III, lines 8–9 (tr. C. E. Norton).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio
On a Dead Child http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2930.html, st. 1 (1890).
Poetry
"A Complaint by Night of the Lover Not Beloved", line 11.
“True, thy fault is great,
But we are many that will plead for thee”
Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus
Context: True, thy fault is great,
But we are many that will plead for thee;
We and our sisters, dwellers in the streams
That murmur blithely to the joyous mood,
And dolefully to sadness. Not a nook
In darkest woods but some of us are there,
To watch the flowers, that else would die unseen.
“Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.”
Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)
Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)
Context: Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.
Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being.
This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
