The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.
What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.
Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with them. I don't know if it helps my research, but I get a big kick out of Mark Twain, who wrote "The Diaries of Adam and Eve. " He wrote very funny stuff on them. I sometimes read things that are loosely related to what I'm thinking and writing about.
The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.
There's a door. " "Where does it go?" "It stays where it is, I think.
Even small acts of kindness can make a profound difference to somebody else.
Ten strong horses could not pull an empty baby carriage if they worked independently of each other.