
Canto XXXIII, lines 85–87 (tr. Ciardi).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso
Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 3 (Examinations), p. 27.
Canto XXXIII, lines 85–87 (tr. Ciardi).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso
“I stepped back and all I saw was rain through windowpanes that looked like melting silver.”
109
The Kite Runner (2003)
Referring to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's comments on trying terrorists in criminal courts in NYC.
Quoted in
Terrorism
American Acheivement interview (1996)
Source: The Joy Luck Club
Context: Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it. That's how I felt about it. If my parents knew how much I loved it, I thought they would take it away from me. I think I was also blessed with a very wild imagination because I can remember, when I was at an age before I could read, that I could imagine things that weren't real and whatever my imagination saw is what I actually saw. Some people would say that was psychosis but I prefer to say it was the beginning of a writer's imagination. If I believed that insects had eyes and mouths and noses and could talk, that's what they did. If I thought I could see devils dancing out of the ground, that's what I saw. If I thought lightning had eyes and would follow me and strike me down, that's what would happen. And I think I needed an outlet for all that imagination, so I found it in books.
[thedailystar.net, http://www.thedailystar.net/2005/06/26/d506261404102.htm, 1 June, 2006]
Famous Quotes
Black Elk Speaks (1961)
Context: Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
“I have gazed into the abyss, and the abyss has gazed into me. And neither of us liked what we saw.”
[Brother Theodore Complete Collection on Letterman, 1982-89, Don Giller, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj5fVnHWUl4]