“Alice at once fell in love….In that flash of ecstasy she suddenly knew what all poetry, all music, all sculpture, except things like winged Assyrian bulls, or the very broken pieces in the British Museum, meant.”
Angela Thirkell, Pomfret Towers
Both like and unlike young Alice, I get flashes of ecstacy from other people’s words. Some of my favorite quotes are basically funny–dear Angela Thirkell, god bless her. But that quote of hers stayed with me, and gave new meaning when many years later I got to see winged Assyrian bulls in Chicago’s Oriental Institute, or when, on another occasion, I had to smile (discreetly) at the reverential assembly of rubbishy bits of once-grand marbles, their ears and noses and dongs all lost to history, at LA’s Getty Museum.
What is it about the quotes that live in our memories–like pebbles rubbed almost smooth by a New England glacier, and carried thousands of miles from the place they started? (Or like a sweater handed down by your mother.) Their previous lives make them precious, weighty, authentic.
I plan to share some of my favorite quotes in this blog.