True Specific Gravity

Famous quotes containing the words true, specific and/or gravity:

    “The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
    —Harold Bloom (b. 1930)

    “The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
    They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.”
    —Derek Mahon (b. 1941)