All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a goo… - W. H. Auden

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, as surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear that same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.

All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.