Eternity's Sunrise Quotes

“As a child, young William alarmed his parents by reporting that he experienced visions. In later life he told his friends that he had seen angels among the haymakers in the fields, which still lay in easy walking distance from Broad Street. when he got home and reported the vision, he barely escaped a thrashing for telling a lie. More disturbingly, his wife once remarked, "You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old and he put his head to the window and set you screaming.”
― Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

“And throughout all Eternity I forgive you you forgive me, As our dear Redeemer said, This the wine and this the bread.”
― Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

“why was I born with a different face, Why was I not born like the rest of my race? When I look each one starts! when I speak I offend Then I’m silent and passive and lose every friend.”
― Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

“It is important to recognize that Blake was a troubled spirit, subject to deep psychic stresses, with what we would now call paranoid and schizoid tendencies that were sometimes overwhelming. During his life he was often accused of madness, but the artist Samuel Palmer, who knew him well, remembered him as ‘one of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane man I have ever known.’ And a Baptist minister replied, when asked if he thought Blake was cracked, ‘Yes, but his is a crack that lets in the light.”
― Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

“Young took it for granted that it was very wrong to break loose from reason's chain and that indulgence in pleasure invites the "pall" of death. Blake believed just the opposite. In his picture "sense" is naked and lovely, arms joyously raised and long tresses tossing freely. A small fetter on her right ankle -- hardly more than an ankle bracelet -- is the sole trace of Young's chain, and she is walking easily toward the viewer over gently rolling sunlit hills, not running "savage." What she doesn't know is that a gigantic figure, hands clenched with effort, is about to drop his enormous black cloak over her, smothering her in darkness. Most viewers would have assumed that this looming threat was a personification of death, but more likely Blake thought of it as reason, from whom sense has all too briefly escaped.”
― Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

“Blake took great pride in his skill: "I defy any man to cut cleaner strokes than I do, or rougher when I please." But he also acknowledged that "engraving is eternal work.... I curse and bless engraving alternately because it takes so much time and is so intractable, though capable of such beauty and perfection.”
― Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

“At the customary age of thirteen Blake was apprenticed to an engraver named James Basire in Great Queen Street near Covent Garden, less than a mile from home. The apprenticeship lasted for the usual seven years, during which he lived in Basire's house, usually with one or more other boys. The youths put in thirteen-hour days for a work week of seventy-eight hours, with only Sunday off, and that was usual too.”
― Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake