“You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
-James Baldwin
“I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier.”
-Anne Carson
“Too true about endings in poetry. All these closures are made a bit silly by the way everything is opened up again a page later. It’s kind of art living at a microbe’s pace, or at most a shrew’s, but not ever a person’s, like a novel, or a crocodile’s, like a sculpture.”
-Max Ritvo
“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.”
– James Baldwin
The Simile Museum 