Sublime

Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won’t keep shape.’

He has a kind, round face and the relaxed, easygoing manner of someone who’s spent most of his life in California.

Bill Walsh (who I’ve described exclusively as my personal hero since first picking up a copy of his essential text The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English

‘You are a poem – and that is to be the best part of a poet – what makes up the poet’s consciousness in his best moods,’ said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals.

Who was Jack Gilbert? Students told me he was the most extraordinary man they’d ever encountered. He had seemed not quite of this world, they said. He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged them to do the same. He didn’t so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why: because of delight. Because of stubborn

Whatever was not problematical and suspected about this young man – for example, a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders – was positively unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at least one copy

The very best way to describe Scott Peterson’s demeanor is that it looks like he’s constantly posing for a photograph nobody is taking.