Skinny Legs and All (1990)
“Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.”
Variant: Art is a house that tries to be haunted.
Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“In the oldest, bunched houses with tottering stairs”
St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)
“If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,”
"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p
“Art doesn't always mirror life and life's hard sometimes.”
From "The Diary of Billy Talent":
“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
“I don't know why people expect art to make sense. Life doesn't make sense.”
