Odd Column

Famous quotes containing the words odd and/or column:

    ‘Tis not such lines as almost crack the stage
    When Bajazet begins to rage;
    Nor a tall met’phor in the bombast way,
    Nor the dry chips of short-lunged Seneca.
    Nor upon all things to obtrude
    And force some odd similitude.
    What is it then, which like the power divine
    We only can by negatives define?
    Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)

    When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)