Fantasy Authors

"My first impression of the man as of steel was consolidated and enhanced. He told us, amongst other things, of the work he had in hand. Three great books were partially done. The translation of the Arabian Nights, the metrical translation of Camoëns, and the Book of the Sword. These were all works of vast magnitude and requiring endless research. But he lived to complete them all."

"I could not but be struck by the strangers. The lady was a big, handsome blonde woman, clever-looking and capable. But the man riveted my attention. He was dark, and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance. I did not have much time to analyse the face; the bustle of arrival prevented that. But an instant was enough to make up my mind about him. We separated in the carriage after cordial wishes that we might meet again. When we were on the platform, I asked Irving: "Who is that man?" "Why," he said, " I thought I introduced you!" "So you did, but you did not mention the names of the others!" He looked at me for an instant and said inquiringly as though something had struck him: "Tell me, why do you want to know?" "Because," I answered, "I never saw any one like him. He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!" "You are right!" he said. "But I thought you knew him. That is Burton — Captain Burton who went to Mecca!"

"The fame of an actor is won in minutes and seconds, not in years. The latter are only helpful in the recurrence of opportunities; in the possibilities of repetition. It is not feasible, therefore, adequately to record the progress of his work. Indeed that work in its perfection cannot be recorded; words are, and can be, but faint suggestions of awakened emotion. The student of history can, after all, but accept in matters evanescent the judgment of contemporary experience. Of such, the weight of evidence can at best incline in one direction; and that tendency is not susceptible of further proof. So much, then, for the work of art that is not plastic and permanent. There remains therefore but the artist. Of him the other arts can make record in so far as external appearance goes. Nay, more, the genius of sculptor or painter can suggest — with an understanding as subtle as that of the sun-rays which on sensitive media can depict what cannot be seen by the eye — the existence of these inner forces and qualities whence accomplished works of any kind proceed. It is to such art that we look for the teaching of our eyes. Modern science can record something of the actualities of voice and tone. Writers of force and skill and judgment can convey abstract ideas of controlling forces and purposes; of thwarting passions; of embarrassing weaknesses; of all the bundle of inconsistencies which make up an item of concrete humanity. From all these may be derived some consistent idea of individuality. This individuality is at once the ideal and the objective of portraiture."

"Logically speaking, even the life of an actor has no preface. He begins, and that is all. And such beginning is usually obscure; but faintly remembered at the best. Art is a completion; not merely a history of endeavour. It is only when completeness has been obtained that the beginnings of endeavour gain importance, and that the steps by which it has been won assume any shape of permanent interest. After all, the struggle for supremacy is so universal that the matters of hope and difficulty of one person are hardly of general interest. When the individual has won out from the huddle of strife, the means and steps of his succeeding become of interest, either historically or in the educational aspect — but not before. From every life there may be a lesson to some one; but in the teeming millions of humanity such lessons can but seldom have any general or exhaustive force. The mere din of strife is too incessant for any individual sound to carry far. Fame, who rides in higher atmosphere, can alone make her purpose heard. Well did the framers of picturesque idea understand their work when in her hand they put a symbolic trumpet."

"Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured."

"You think to baffle me, you—with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's."

"One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever."

"Despair has its own calms."

"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be."

"Listen to them — the children of the night. What music they make."

"We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things."

"Do not grieve for her! Who knows, but she may have found the joy she sought? Love and patience are all that make for happiness in this world; or in the world of the past or of the future; of the living or the dead. She dreamed her dream; and that is all that any of us can ask."

"In my College days I had been Auditor of the Historical Society — a post which corresponds to the Presidency of the Union in Oxford or Cambridge — and had got medals, or certificates, for History, Composition and Oratory. I had been President of the Philosophical Society; had got Honours in pure mathematics. I had won numerous silver cups for races of various kinds. I had played for years in the University football team, where I had received the honour of a “cap”! I was physically immensely strong. In fact I feel justified in saying I represented in my own person something of that aim of university education mens sana in corpore sano"

"I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years."

"Great is the rose That challenges the crypt, And quotes milleniums Against the grave."

"I remember that Bob had bought several books during the trip, and they were in sight. One was a collection of verse by a talented child named Nathalia Crane, then making a sizable splash in the American literary world."

"Some of the critics explained the work by insisting that the child was some sort of medium, an instrument unaware of what was played upon it; others, considering the book a hoax, scorned the fact that any child could have written verses so smooth in execution and so remarkable in spiritual overtones. … The appeal of such lines is not that they have been written by a child but by a poet."

"Nathalia can explain practically every line she has ever written; I have heard her uncertain treble clarify passages that have puzzled erudite authors. No poet that ever lived delighted in amassing such curious, half-forgotten sounds; not even Francis Thompson had so great a vocabulary of rare and archaic terms. . . Nathalia collects words the way a boy of her age collects postage stamps; she had thumbed Noah Webster's work (in various editions) and made a glossary of her own. The dictionary is her playbox and she knows exactly where every odd toy is concealed."

"Nathalia sort of sings her poems to herself — they come into being that way. She reads Kipling constantly, and Conan Doyle is her favorite. The only poet she likes is Longfellow, but she doesn't enthuse over him. She likes wild, imaginative tales. When she finds a word she likes or doesn't understand, she looks it up in every available dictionary and studies every possible meaning and use for it..."

"It seems impossible to me that a girl so immature could have written these poems. They are beyond the powers of a girl of twelve. The sophisticated viewpoint of sex … knowledge of history and archeology found in these pages place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind."

"A year ago, to a startled public, was revealed the most extraordinary prodigy of them all — Nathalia Crane, 11-year-old poet, "The Baby Browning of Brooklyn," whose first volume of verse, The Janitor's Boy, was heralded by critics to be a work of genius. Such words as "blastoderm", "sindoc," "peris," "parasang," "sarcenet," "teazel," "nullah," "cantatrice," "barracan," "sistrum," writhed and hissed in her verses. One poem began with the nebular hypothesis and ended with prohibition; others cantered with a Eugene Fieldian humor; still others coldly glowed with the passion-weary detachment of a woman who has had her fill of life and its motley follies. Critic-Poet Louis Untermeyer chortled with elation. Poet William Rose Benét wrote a preface. The English Society of Authors and Playwrights (of which Thomas Hardy is President) asked Nathalia Crane to join them."

"Let go the lure The striving to unmake;Behold the truth Whenever heart may ache There is a glory In a great mistake."

"And the eyes of all look upward seeing sign-word drawing nigh, The stony wings of Egypt coming back across the sky;We hear the clinking tamborine of Miriam anew; We believe in every miracle since Lindbergh flew the blue — The wonder of the long draw when the bowstring is a thread — The beauty of a courage that can raise the wings of lead."

"A single-motored miracle, a lead mine on each flank; Below a shadow swept and awed the hundred-fathom bank."

"A thousand ardent oilers swung the long spout 'twixt their nods, And tried to glimpse a meaning in the challenge of the gods.And then one night there landed on a Mineola swale A plane that looked like pewter, with a carrier of mail.Its wings were tinged like tea-box skins, each truss of shadow gray, Its cabin but an alcove slung beneath a metal ray. The Spirit of St. Louis was inscribed upon the lee; It came from out a province that had never seen the sea."

"The gods released a vision on a world forespent and dull; They sent it as a challenge by the sea hawk and the gull.It roused the Norman eagerness, the Albion cliffs turned red: "You fly the wings of logic — can you fly the wings of lead?"

"Cloud-made mountains towered, Beckoning to me; Visionary triremes Talked about the sea..."

"The very serpents bite their tails; the bees forget to sting, For a language so celestial setteth up a wondering.And the touch of absent mindedness is more than any line, Since direction counts for nothing when the gods set up a sign."

"The sign work of the Orient it runneth up and down; The Talmud stalks from right to left, a rabbi in a gown;The Roman rolls from left to right from Maytime unto May; But the gods shake up their symbols in an absent-minded way.Their language runs to circles like the language of the eyes, Emphasised by strange dilations with little panting sighs."

"When you return, the youngest of the seers, Released from fetters of ancestral pose, There will be beauty waiting down the years — Revisions of the ruby and the rose."

"The starry brocade of the summer night Is linked to us as part of our estate; And every bee that wings its sidelong flight Assurance of a sweeter, fairer fate."

"The sun shall shine in ages yet to be, The musing moon illumine pastures dim, And afterwards a new nativity For all who slept the dreamless interim."

"A precious place is Paradise and none may know its worth, But Eden ever longeth for the knicknacks of the earth.The angels grow quite wistful over worldly things below; They hear the hurdy-gurdies in the Candle Makers Row.They listen for the laughter from the antics of the earth; They lower pails from heaven's walls to catch the milk-maids mirth."

"In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose, Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?"

"Finally she faltered; Saw at last, forsooth, Every gaudy color Is a bit of truth. Then the gates were opened; Miracles were seen; That instructed damsel Donned a gown of green;Wore it in a churchyard, All arrayed with care; And a painted rainbow Shone above her there."

"Once a pallid Vestal Doubted truth in blue; Listed red in ruin, Harried every hue;Barricaded vision, Garbed herself in sighs; Ridiculed the birthmarks Of the butterflies."

"I linger on the flathouse roof, the moonlight is divine. But my heart is all aflutter like the washing on the line."

"He'll carry me off, I know that he will, For his hair is exceedingly red; And the only thing that occurs to me Is to dutifully shiver in bed."

"Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy, And the janitor's boy loves me; He's going to hunt for a desert isle In our geography."

"Lo and behold! God made this starry wold, The maggot and the mold; lo and behold! He taught the grass contentment blade by blade, The sanctity of sameness in a shade."

"The rose has told In one simplicity. That never life Relinquishes a bloom But to bestow An ancient confidence."

"Great is the rose Infected by the tomb, Yet burgeoning Indifferent to death."

"He found the harem filled with rocking maids Surrendered to the orgies of the sob."

"Oh, we have had great lovers that we followed to the pyre; Our boasts out-do the Sabine girls—the Mosque of St. Sophia. And we are very sure of ours, for when a city falls, They seize us and they love us and they hurl us from the walls."

"Treating the sword blade the same as the staff, Turning the chariot wheel into chaff. Toppling a pillar and nudging a wall, Building a sand pile to counter each fall. Yielding to nothing — not even the rose, The dust has its reasons wherever it goes."

"The world is growing gentle, But few know what she owes To the understanding lily And the judgment of the rose."

"Said the tiger to the lily, Said the viper to the rose, Let us marry so our children May attain the double pose.With a feline half a flower — With the attar in the asp We could institute a slaughter That would make a planet gasp."

"You cannot choose your battlefield, God does that for you; But you can plant a standard Where a standard never flew. 11px|frameless QOTD 2007·11·01 Sound file"

"Across the downs a hummingbird Came dipping through the bowers, He pivoted on emptiness To scrutinize the flowers."

"In some sense, every magician is a weaver, merely one who works with invisible strands of the hidden light. With it we weave our various forms, just as a weaver produces cloth, and then stitch them into the images we desire, just as a tailor sews cloth into a tunic or robe. If we be journeymen in our craft, forces will come to inhabit our forms, just as a person will come to buy the tunic and place it over his body. But if we have plumbed the secret recesses of our art, if we are masters of our craft, then we can both weave the forms and place our own bodies within them."