Whitmanesque Quotes

“Such is a community
of inviolable immunity, protected
from tampering or harpooning
mutiny. Every better thinker’s impulse
to shrink us (at the shoreline from our
lifeblood’s deep pulse) uses disparaging
scrutiny to sink us.”
― Kristen Henderson, Of My Maiden Smoking

“The late-night New York you saw from a moving car was relatively quite and empty, more like anyplace else in nocturnal America. Only at these subdued moments could you truly comprehend that this glittering, blighted city was part of a slumbering continent; a vastness where headlights answered the constellations; a fertile black roll of field and woods dotted by the arctic brightness of gas stations and all-night diners, town after shuttered town strung with streetlights, sparsely attended by the members of the night shifts, the wanderers who scavenged in the dark, the insomniacs with their reading lights, the mothers trying to console colicky babies, the waitresses and gas-pump guys, the bakers and the lunatics. And scattered all over, abundant as stars, disc jockeys sending music out to whoever might be listening.”
― Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days