Closely Held Company

Famous quotes containing the words closely, held and/or company:

    Description is revelation. It is not
    The thing described, nor false facsimile.
    It is an artificial thing that exists,
    In its own seeming, plainly visible,
    Yet not too closely the double of our lives,
    Intenser than any actual life could be....
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    Indeed, my mother’s beautiful face still shone with youthfulness that night when she so softly held my hands and sought to stop my tears; but, precisely, it seemed to me that this should not have happened, her anger would have saddened me less than this new sweetness that my childhood had never known; it seemed to me that, with a hidden and impious hand, I had just traced the first wrinkle and made appear the first grey hair in her soul.
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.
    Philip Roth (b. 1933)