"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.  Let us spend our lives in conceiving then.  The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails."

~ Henry D. Thoreau, American author, naturalist, philosopher (1817 - 1862) Walden. 



29 Talbot Street The Neat Little Bookshop

"I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.  If it is child's play, an extension of make-believe ~ something one is frequently assured by persons who write about writing ~ how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a racing bike over the Alps?  Perhaps the cultural attache at a Canadian embassy who said to me "Yes, but what do you really do?" was expressing an adult opinion.  Perhaps a writer is, in fact, a child in disguise, with a child's lucid view of grown-ups, accurate as to atmosphere, improvising when it tries to make sense of adult behavior."
~ Mavis Gallant, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Canadian Writer (b. August 11, 1922) A Douglas Gibson Book M&S, 1996.