In what distant deeps

    I wanted to live among books.

-Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
Image: Kerry Mansfield
Title: William Blake, from “The Tyger”

Deep down and deep inland

"You think I’ll be happy?" 
“Yeah, you just won’t know it.”

-	Alec Baldwin & Kevin Bacon, from the movie, She's having a baby

Image: Argyle Plaids, Left in her Wake

Title: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 87

Willing to Sail

Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe.
-Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Seashore with Shipwreck by Moonlight, 1825-30 
Title: from John Macdonald's, A Naval, Military and Political Telegraphic Dictionary, Numerically Arranged on a Very Comprehensive Scale, 1817

The silence of untranslated stars

     …you can look at something, close your eyes, and see it again and still know nothing – like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.

     -Ann Beattie, Jacklighting

     Image:  Laure Albin-Guillot, Planche XVI Diatomée, 1931

               Title: e.e. cummings, adapted from "Summer Silence"

An archer in cover

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is 

 

nothing that does not require his attention.” 

-Flannery O'Connor

Picture: Flor Garduno, La pavo real (2008)
Title: Dorothy Dunnett