In 1931, in the throes of the Great Depression, Grant Wood made a chronological list of thirteen prior economic depressions, beginning with 1819.

Comes upon and at me / does your gone-tinged promise.

Usually all we have to do when we go a-conquering is to build a boat, find a benefactress, recruit a ribald crew, and wear radiant glinting helmets.

I’m sure I’ll take you with pleasure!” the Queen said.

Since the time of Descartes, Westerners have seen their core identity as a feature that stands apart from the physical world.

He learned of Sergei’s arrest and imprisonment when a waiter switched the television to CNN.

There seemed to be a fellow feeling between the priest and bus driver, each too slight for his uniform.

My brother Walter is depressed.

My wife took me to Las Vegas to celebrate my fortieth birthday.

Alec Soth’s spare volume of documentation culminates in that deliciously inspired last-minute stab at monetary redemption.

Patty promised her old friend Coren she had the very best cure for heartache: the shrewd and pitiless French.

At night, alone in the greenhouse, Dr. Kreutzer listens to Bach.

I got to meet my heroes / and have dinner with them

In that part of the field / near the woodpile / had arisen an indistinct figure, / like a deeper blotch / in the evening darkness, / a seeming dog flying over the roofs.

If it is better to be feared / than loved, best of all / pitied—obeyed not out of threat / but an understanding / the inability to harm / makes benevolence / a moot point.

When the previously withheld faces grew tough as flax / or softened into pliant pine in the umber wood, inclined / together, numerous, when the cobble crushed underfoot, / and pistachios cracked in their shells, grown heavy, / grown consummate among the nibs of leaves, then curious / seemed the stars, those nether eyes which scrutinized / each shape that stirred against the unlit trunks of trees.

The psalm is a door / that tears me.

No more the lovely ease of it all, / and many years removed / from those languorous afternoons / where, together, they seemed / to create their own air

Behind the hill / overlooking our tiny enclave / dwells a giant known far and wide

Wintering Beech / Tabernacle of green light green shade, summer space / of beechen green and shadows numberless, / that’s now but a bony show of itself, all its / ornaments and nest-hiding glad rags / wind-torn and let go where silence opens / its stony arms.

Each gets so shamefully little, only half a face, honed to a fine point, like swallow shadows dipping after mosquitoes

I am inappropriate I feel it / in every said thing in every / enthusiasm desire wish / but mostly in every / unsettling ambition

Part of the pearlescent surface is gone / from the glass back to sand

The turrets, self-conscious and vulgar, / the doors, so functional, / the tinted windows, lovely and perhaps unreasonable.

I am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers.

Great books are never abandoners—they don’t betray us; they don’t turn away from our candid admiration or criticism; they don’t die.

The “historic” novel is, for me, condemned even in cases of labour as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness, for the simple reason that the difficulty of the job is inordinate and that a mere escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naiveté becomes inevitable.