Sensitive Period

Famous quotes containing the words sensitive and/or period:

    Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases—that is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.
    William Logan, U.S. educator. “Condition of the Individual Talent,” The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.

    Of all the barbarous middle ages, that
    Which is most barbarous is the middle age
    Of man! it is—I really scarce know what;
    But when we hover between fool and sage,
    And don’t know justly what we would be at—
    A period something like a printed page,
    Black letter upon foolscap, while our hair
    Grows grizzled, and we are not what we were.
    George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)