Emily Dickinson Face to Face Quotes

“Emily’s own conservatory was like fairyland at all seasons, especially in comparison with the dreary white winter cold outside. It opened from the dining-room, a tiny glass room, with white shelves running around it on which were grouped the loveliest ferns, rich purple heliotrope, the yellow jasmine, and one giant Daphne odora with its orange-bloom scent astray from the Riviera, and two majestic cape jasmines, exotics kin to her alien soul. She tolerated none of the usual variety of mongrel houseplants. A rare scarlet lily, a resurrection calla, perhaps—and here it was always summer with the oxalis dripping from hanging baskets like humble incense upon the heads of the household and its frequenters.”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“David Foster Wallace, Something to Do with Paying Attention”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“The small heart cannot break. The ecstasy of its penalty solaces the large. Emerging from an abyss and reëentering it, that is Life, dear, is it not?”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“Where we owe but little we pay. Where we owe so much it defies money we are blandly insolvent. Has All a codicil?”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“as vigilant as any spider… Emily Dickinson differed from all the women letter-writers of France and England in her scorn of detail, scarcely hitting the paper long enough to make her communication intelligible.”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“How could she escape the God-haunted ancestry from which she had sprung?”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“Her impatience with detail and what she termed ‘mere fact’ grew upon her, in her search for truth. It was the principle beyond the truth that she was after, the source of light beyond the pine trees; and not only the principle, but its ultimate significance. As death took from her one after another of those she had most loved, she apparently became more preoccupied with Eternity, not as an abstraction, but a further phase of life and love.”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“Lord Byron, that elegant object of the lifted eyebrow of a hundred years ago.”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“when some message of his to the man about the frogs in the lower meadow had not been executed with becoming dispatch, their father took his hat and cane in high dudgeon, and walked out, remarking haughtily, ‘I’ll speak to the frogs myself about it!’—too vexed to notice his absurd slip of the tongue, and was met by Emily on his return with ‘Did you find the frogs deferential, Father?”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“nothing could be more fatal to knowing Aunt Emily on her own terms than to take her literally when her mood was hyperbolic.23”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“Daphne odora, moved out from the conservatory, stood at one end with the cape jasmine. Two tall oleanders were blossoming in their green tubs, and a pomegranate whose flowering was an event to us all.”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“Most of all her ‘vote’ was for my highest-heeled red slippers. ‘Going to a wake, I take it, dear?”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“Some of these notes are the brief messages that were afterward published as ‘The Single Hound.”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“the difference between Outsiders and Inhabitants: persons whose fantasies were based on surmise, versus those whose fantasies were based on contact.”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“Susan’s Idolator keeps a Shrine for Susan. [about 1868] • Sue makes sick Days so sweet, we almost hate our health. Emily— [early 1873?] • Only Woman in the World, Accept a Julep— [about 1875] • To own a Susan of my own Is of itself a Bliss—Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord, Continue me in this! [about 1877]”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face

“Emily Dickinson Friend and Neighbor, by MacGregor Jenkins. I read it online.”
― Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face