Sharing thousands of sparkling, moving, entrancing quotations amassed over decades of slow-savoured reading, to refresh the mind and spirit and invigorate flagging thought and flaccid prose. Dive in!

A quotation is not an excerpt. A quotation is a cicada. It is part of its nature never to quiet down. Once having got hold of the air, it does not release it.

Source: Osip Mandelstam, ‘Conversation about Dante’ (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011), p. 108

I have discovered that, with the passing of the years, my ignorance in countless areas… has become increasingly perfected while, at the same time, a lifelong practice of haphazard readings has left me with a sort of commonplace book in whose pages I find my own thoughts put into the words of others.

Source: Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2007), p. 3

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An electric moment

Having a soft spot for foxes, I loved this description of a hair-raising drive careering through the mountain roads of Ithaca in the 1950s, with a fox appearing on the road and showing no concern or fear even with a car-load of men shouting at him. You can imagine...

It will do what it is supposed to do

Listening time: 7 minutes. This marvelous prose-poem comes from a travel book by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who toured a number of Soviet Union states in the 1960s. In Georgia he meets a maker of cognac, and proceeds with a beautiful account of the...

Sheer from the sea

In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Louis Golding sailed passed Ithaca. Minds were on other things than Homer and Odysseus, but this evocative statement about the island, uttered by a sailor on the boat deck, must have contributed to his long-delayed but...

Ancient travellers

Perhaps this is obvious, but it had never occurred to me in any conscious way, and I wonder how far it is true, as I have a romantic image of people navigating by the stars. Will think about this today when we are travelling to Brazil on a night flight. Will think of...