Composite Door Quotes

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

The Author To Her Book Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth did'st by my side remain, Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad exposed to public view, Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judge). At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call. I cast thee by as one unfit for light, The visage was so irksome in my sight, Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could. I washed thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet. In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find. In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam. In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come, And take thy way where yet thou art not known. If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none; And for thy mother, she alas is poor, Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on. In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung. Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium - nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the sparkle curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, solemnly enjoying new-found popularity and expanded respect. From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen´s ability to establish succinct analogies among life´s realities, his talent for creating intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have neither "covered" his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies - aural bouquets of gardenia and thistle - that bring to mind an electrified, de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just could`t expose. It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.

As an anonymous letter has recently informed me, a dictatorship is a powerful incitement to the composition of anonymous letters. I have never known a time when so many were in circulation. They are continually arriving at my door. Inspired by passion and enjoying the irresponsibility of their orphaned condition, they nevertheless have one great advantage over legitimate correspondence: they expose their ideas to their ultimate conclusion; they empty the sack.

The little one-story house was as neat as a fresh pinafore. The front lawn was cut lovingly and very green. The smooth composition driveway was free of grease spots from standing cars, and the hedge that bordered it looked as though the barber came every day. The white door had a knocker with a tiger's head, a go-to-hell window and a dingus that let someone inside talk to someone outside without even opening the little window. I'd have given a mortgage on my left leg to live in a house like that. I didn't think I ever would. (The Pencil)

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly denned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly awake.

give a noun.” “Door,” said Mr. Kaplan, smiling. It seemed to Mr. Parkhill that “door” had been given only a moment earlier, by Miss Mitnick. “Y-es,” said Mr. Parkhill. “Er—and another noun?” “Another door,” Mr. Kaplan replied promptly. Mr. Parkhill put him down as a doubtful “C.” Everything pointed to the fact that Mr. Kaplan might have to be kept on an extra three months before he was ready for promotion to Composition, Grammar, and Civics, with Miss Higby. One night Mrs. Moskowitz read a sentence, from “English for Beginners,

he has served for three of his four short years at Payne in administration, directing the undergraduate writing center and the much contested/maligned composition program. (No reasonable person outside a university would believe the teaching of composition to be controversial, but of course it is.) Professor West has an open-door policy

Plants continually monitor every aspect of their environment: spatial orientation; presence, absence, and identity of neighbors; disturbance; competition; predation, whether microbial, insect, or animal; composition of atmosphere; composition of soil; water presence, location, and amount; degree of incoming light; propagation, protection, and support of offspring (yes, they recognize kin); communications from other plants in their ecorange; biological oscillations, including circadian; and not only their own health but the health of the ecorange in which they live. As Anthony Trewavas comments, this “continually and specifically changes the information spectrum” to which the plants are attending.

And some chapters of this book should be read in dim candlelight; not because of the classical style and composition of the writing, but because reading them will make us disbelieve and doubt the things we see and the very world we live in. They force us to retreat to our rooms or behind locked doors to ponder how much our understanding of the world is rooted in reality and how much in fantasy.

physician and viral researcher Frank Ryan comments . . . Viruses have a kind of sensation that could be classed as intermediate between a rudimentary smell or touch . . . they have a way of detecting the chemical composition of cell surfaces. . . . This gives a virus the most exquisite ability to sense the right cell surfaces. It recognizes them through a perception in three-dimensional surface chemistry.1

Greta's cedar hope chest Is full of pamphlets Glass shelves of romantic vignettes A journal laced with sedimentary prose Norma gathers and collects vintage photoplays Hair combs valentines Lillian allows the animals to scratch And the leather crack And the mail collect in the box as coatings peel Agnes veiled cathedral dweller Smiles with benevolent pain But it's Katrina's fair Tuesday morning As she with caution unlatches the flat door She alone cascades to the basement Careful not to spoil her Calico printed pinafore Composite traits and mannerists All others dissipate Marguerite vigilant She dwells upon frigid casements Sarah's thoughts in high velocity Accusations always pierce and pass Clara abandons her passions for distastes A Miss Lenora P. Sinclair Early for coffee in the pool "I'm resituating all your words" Capital Space Colon Paragraph Sylvia keeps beasts in jars labeled by Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species But it's Katrina's fair Tuesday morning As she with caution unlatches the flat door She alone cascades to the basement Careful not to spoil her Calico printed pinafore Composite traits and mannerists All others dissipate Down the way a silk design This face is mine Tis I, Katrina! Katrina, I.

He made me depict from memory, in the greatest possible detail, objects I had certainly seen thousands of times without visualizing them properly: a street lamp, a postbox, the tulip design on the stained glass of our own front door. He tried to teach me to find the geometrical coordinations between the slender twigs of a leafless boulevard tree, a system of visual give-and-takes, requiring a precision of linear expression, which I failed to achieve in my youth, but applied gratefully, in my adult instar, not only to the drawing of butterfly genitalia during my seven years at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, when immersing myself in the bright wellhole of a microscope to record in India ink this or that new structure; but also, perhaps, to certain camera-lucida needs of literary composition.

I missed my workout this morning, so I vault up the stairs to my flat. Breakfast has taken longer than intended, and I'm expecting Oliver at any minute. Part of me also hopes that Alessia will still be there. As I approach my front door, I hear music coming from the flat. Music? What's going on? I slide my key into the lock and cautiously open the door. It's Bach, one of his preludes in G Major. Perhaps Alessia is playing music through my computer. But how can she? She doesn't know the password. Does she? Maybe she's playing her phone through the sound system, though from the look of her tatty anorak she doesn't strike me as someone who has a smartphone. I've never seen her with one. The music rings through my flat, lighting up its darkest corners. Who knew that my daily likes classical? This is a tiny piece of the Alessia Demachi puzzle. Quickly I close the door, but as I stand in the hallway, it becomes apparent that the music is not coming from the sound system. It's from my piano. Bach. Fluid and light, played with a deftness and understanding I've only heard from concert-standard performers. Alessia? I've never managed to make my piano sing like this. Taking off my shoes, I creep down the hallway and peer around the door into the drawing room. She is seated at the piano in her housecoat and scarf, swaying a little, completely lost in the music, her eyes closed in concentration as her hands move with graceful dexterity across the keys. The music flows through her, echoing off the walls and ceiling in a flawless performance worthy of any concert pianist. I watch her in awe as she plays, her head bowed. She is brilliant. In every way. And I'm completely spellbound. She finishes the prelude, and I step back into the hall, flattening myself against the wall in case she looks up, not daring to breath. However, without missing a beat she goes straight into the fugue. I lean against the wall and close my eyes, marveling at her artistry and the feeling that she puts into each phrase. I'm carried away by the music, and as I listen, I realize that she wasn't reading the music. She's playing from memory. Good God. She's a fucking virtuoso. And I remember her intense focus when she examined my score while she was dusting the piano. Clearly she was reading the music. Shit. She plays at this standard and she was reading my composition? The fugue ends, and seamlessly she launches into another piece. Again Bach, Prelude in C-sharp Major, I think.

Sargent painted a series of three portraits of the author Robert Louis Stevenson and the second, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife (1885), is now one of the artist’s best known portraits. Completed less than a year before the publication of the hugely popular The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Sargent depicts Stevenson pacing before us, while his wife Fanny is seated in background to the right of the door. Reviews were mixed about the painting, with some critics feeling that the arrangement of the composition was odd and the depiction of the novelist was unflattering. However, Stevenson thought Sargent had correctly captured his odd manner of fidgeting about the room while he was trying to write. When Sargent painted the canvas, he wrote to Henry James and said that Stevenson “seemed to me the most intense creature I had ever met.” Sargent was twenty-nine years old at the time and Stevenson was thirty-four and at the height of his most productive period. He had just published Treasure Island in book form in 1883, his first full-length novel, and his popularity only grew in the public’s eye with The Black Arrow (1883), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) and Kidnapped (1886). Interestingly, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife sold in 2004 for $8.8 million to the Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn to be installed at his newest casino, Wynn Las Vegas.

Every day I was enchanted as I had been three decades before by the sweet, simple canangsari offerings—hand-sized compositions of colorful flowers on green coconut leaves, some graced with a cracker—that were meticulously placed outside my door and on bustling sidewalks, off-the-beaten-path foot trails, temple thresholds, and business entrances alike. And

You’re not wearing a shirt or waistcoat.” The corners of his lips turned up, the first real humor she’d seen in him—and at her expense. “You spent a half hour sketching me, and you’re only noticing this now?” An hour sketching him, taking him apart visually and putting him back together on the page as a composition, a study. As he’d hunched over his letter, his chest had been a shadow she’d avoided. “I noticed.” Though she’d noticed by omission. Her gaze traveled down. “What is this?” “The cat…” He didn’t move, didn’t leap off the couch and hold the door open for her. Jenny pushed the dressing gown farther apart, revealing two long, angry red welts running up Elijah’s belly to his sternum. “Timothy did this?” She touched the welts, surprised they weren’t hot. Elijah’s stomach went still beneath her fingers, as if he’d stopped breathing. “Timothy was an uninvited guest at a kiss,” he said. “An ill-advised kiss. He absented himself from the proceedings as best he could.” As

The third type of possession and madness is possession by the Muses. When this seizes upon a gentle and virgin soul it rouses it to inspired expression in lyric and other sorts of poetry, and glorifies countless deeds of the heroes of old for the instruction of posterity. But if a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.  

Some books, some authors, open up doors of possibility for me as a writer. They break down what I know of form and composition and the rules of telling true stories and reassemble them into something novel and unfamiliar before handing them back to me to say “here, you can also do it like this”.

it is a shame that so many beautiful places have become immensely popular within the past 3-4 years...they are being plastered all over the internet making people want to go and see them, especially photographers...and its a further shame that so many photographers only want to take pictures, with the goal to share to their social media sites and get likes, sponsors, and money...ironically how before that, like just 4 years ago, you seldom saw many images of unknown places, and most people had no clue where these spots where...now these special places are becoming less unique as they get more and more coverage and exposure, becoming less and less mystical to the art-world... it is also a further shame how many of these photographers only care about themselves and getting their picture at any cost, including the cost of damaging their natural surroundings with their ignorance...and my god, the stuff i have seen them do and leave behind in their wake is appalling...and more and more all the reason for why i will not disclose anymore the places where i go now that are unknown treasures which i have been discovering, so these new photo sites do not ever have to become overrun like so many other beautiful places have regrettably become, all due to inconsiderate and selfish people with their selfish cameras and cellphones, and selfish actions, those annoying people out there who are merely like pesky fleas to a very beautiful location, sucking the blood and life out of it slowly... i feel partially to blame, as i used to always give people locations of my photo comps, so many of the places not many knew about and were rarely visited, let alone photographed...there were spots i photographed over 5 years ago, and now many of these sites are overrun with greed and stupidity, getting trashed, tagged, and overrun. i know i am not directly to blame, but i was part of the problem even though i was only trying to help out other courteous photographers, but in the process of doing just that, the door opened to the ugly people looking to use others and use places for their own greedy intentions...i would even give them the gps to within 5 feet of the spot if they asked me...i was always so open and as helpful as i could be...also gave out all my camera settings and told how i went about creating my impressions with my equipment and thoughts about the composition... now look what has happened...i am not to blame, but i do carry much of the responsibility as word got out to these previously secluded locations...so now, i want no part of it anymore. and even-though now i often get called selfish and mean for not disclosing my locations, i must do what i feel is necessary to protect what i love and the places i love.

There is a part of me that believes that when we grieve the loss of someone we love so dearly, that we are also grieving the loss of our own life. We are a composite of so many parts and emotions that make up us in the human experience, that any sense of loss is directly a sense of loss of ourselves. Through the pain that we feel and face at all the differing stages of our grief, we will come to understand life differently from our state of “before” this loss.

For me, grief is like waking up every day in a different house. I feel as though I ought to know my way around by now. I have been grieving for my father for more than 2 years but find that I am continually losing my bearings, struggling to learn the layout anew. I will walk through a door in my mind that I didn't even notice the day before, trip over a memory I've relived a thousand times, and it's as if I were seeing the space around me, breathing in this hushed loneliness, for the first time. I try to talk to my husband and children about my mother but soon stop. It's too much of an effort. It feels forced. I have to explain so much before they can understand, and even then, there's no way for them to join me in the past. It's the same when I bring up my father or my grandmother. The three people who saw me through my childhood, who remember best what I was like as a baby and a little girl, are gone, and now I carry these stories and memories alone. Three deaths. One composite lump of grief.

Where on earth did it come from? You can ask that question of any poem, and one inevitable answer is a simple one: work. No made thing springs up unbidden, even those that seem to. The poem that announced itself to the intoxicated Coleridge, before a knock at the door banished most of it from his memory, or the composition that sprung full blown into the head of Mozart, as he stepped down from a carriage after a satisfying dinner, seemed to pour from the artist's hand, so long schooled those hands had become. But years of labor inform those spontaneous productions. Though a poem over which one struggles may seem labored, it often prepares the way for new writing in which what's been learned emerges with an effortless grace.

Traditions are conditioned reflexes. Throughout Part 2 of this book, you will find suggestions for establishing family traditions that will trigger happy anticipation and leave lasting, cherished memories. Traditions around major holidays and minor holidays. Bedtime, bath-time, and mealtime traditions; sports and pastime traditions; birthday and anniversary traditions; charitable and educational traditions. If your family’s traditions coincide with others’ observances, such as celebrating Thanksgiving, you will still make those traditions unique to your family because of the personal nuances you add. Volunteering at the food bank on Thanksgiving morning, measuring and marking their heights on the door frame in the basement, Grandpa’s artistic carving of the turkey, and their uncle’s famous gravy are the traditions our kids salivated about when they were younger, and still do on their long plane rides home at the end of November each year. (By the way, our dog Lizzy has confirmed Pavlov’s observations; when the carving knife turns on, cue the saliva, tail wagging, and doggy squealing.) But don’t limit your family’s traditions to the big and obvious events like Thanksgiving. Weekly taco nights, family book club and movie nights, pajama walks, ice cream sundaes on Sundays, backyard football during halftime of TV games, pancakes in Mom and Dad’s bed on weekends, leaf fights in the fall, walks to the sledding hill on the season’s first snow, Chinese food on anniversaries, Indian food for big occasions, and balloons hanging from the ceiling around the breakfast table on birthday mornings. Be creative, even silly. Make a secret family noise together when you’re the only ones in the elevator. When you share a secret that “can’t leave this room,” everybody knows to reach up in the air and grab the imaginary tidbit before it can get away. Have a family comedy night or a talent show on each birthday. Make holiday cards from scratch. Celebrate major family events by writing personalized lyrics to an old song and karaoking your new composition together. There are two keys to establishing family traditions: repetition and anticipation. When you find something that brings out excitement and smiles in your kids, keep doing it. Not so often that it becomes mundane, but on a regular and predictable enough basis that it becomes an ingrained part of the family repertoire. And begin talking about the traditional event days ahead of time so by the time it finally happens, your kids are beside themselves with excitement. Anticipation can be as much fun as the tradition itself.

Things change all the time, and the more we grasp them, the more it feels like sand is slipping through our fingers. They have to be held gently and carefully, for squeezing ruins the composition. I’ve squeezed Zay until there was damn near nothing left, until he surrendered and broke before my eyes, but he’s not truly gone. If I opened the door and told him he could leave without consequence, he would. For now.

I used to play golf,” said Serge. “It’s a frightening game. Forget football or even NASCAR.” He whistled in awe. “Golf takes it to the brink.” “That bad?” “It’s the mental component. They try to hush it up, but the game can destroy the strongest men. Every year, dozens of ugly psychotic breaks. Frustration builds over a lifetime until a tee shot lands in the water of a sadistic island hole, and then a hedge-fund manager hurls all his clubs like tomahawks at the other guys in plaid knickers before stripping off all his clothes and making ‘snow angels’ in a sand trap, prompting a special unit from the pro shop to hustle him away through secret underground doors. Fortunately, I have the perfect emotional composition to excel at golf.

The scream reached the ears of Simon Fronwieser along with the sound of pounding downstairs at the front door. The physician’s house in the Hennengasse was just a stone’s throw from the river. Earlier, Simon had looked up from his books several times, distracted by the shouting of the raftsmen. Now that the screams were resounding through the narrow lanes of the town, he knew that something must have happened. The knock at the door grew more urgent. With a sigh he closed one of his hefty anatomy volumes. Like all the others, this book never went below the surface of the human body. The composition of the humors, bleeding as a universal remedy…Simon had read these same litanies far too many times, but they hadn’t really taught him anything about the inside of the body. And nothing would change today, as along with the knocking there was now shouting downstairs.

Selena between them at a long counter overlooking the dance floor. Backs to the D.J. booth, they faced the door. Two other homicide detectives, hand-picked by Lt. Lee, posed as a waitress and a bouncer, covering the crowd and the door. The composite the police sketch artist had created with Selena's help burned in their brains, but nothing so far. "This is not nearly

She returned to the kitchen, where she'd been making sugared flowers. Mint leaves, tiny violets and old-fashioned rose petals, heavy with perfume, lay on the counter. Very gently she dipped each one into the stiff egg whites, then in confectioners' sugar, and then placed them on the baking sheet, which she put in the warm oven, the door ajar. It gave the room the scent of a garden, heady and sweet. Sabine had planned to store the sweets in canning jars- there were still a few gaskets and lids left- and save them for cake. When she was a child, her grand-mère had once made her a Saint-Honoré for her birthday. It was the most wondrous cake in the world. Not a cake at all but a composition of tiny puffs of choux pastry filled with vanilla cream, very much like profiteroles, but molded together with caramel and covered with whipped chantilly cream fresh from the dairy. Her grand-mère decorated it with candied flowers and mint leaves. Sabine never had anything like it before or since and suddenly wanted to make that cake again.