Nabokov, from Lolita

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lolita in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About at many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Marilynne Robinson

If to admire and to be influenced are more or less the same thing, I must be influenced most deeply by the nineteenth-century Americans-- Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language and of consciousness-- bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience, rummaging through the exotic and recondite, setting promethean doubts to hymn tunes, refining popular magazine tales into arabesques, pondering bean fields, celebrating the float and odor of hair, always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice. I think they must have believed that everything can be apprehended truly when it is seen in the light of an esthetic understanding appropriate to itself, hence their passion for making novel orders of disparate things. I believe they wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation-- true, serious revelation, the kind that terrifies.
Of course there are any number of ways to write and things to write about, and the world is richer for the fact. I happen to have read these old aunts and uncles at an impressionable age, and so I will always answer to them in my mind.

Richard Ford, from The Sportswriter

As I've said, life has only one certain closure. It is possible to love someone, and no one else, and still not live with that one person or even see her. Anything or anyone who says different is a liar or a sentimentalist or worse. It is possible to be married, to divorce, then to come back together with a whole new set of understandings that you'd never have liked or even understood before in your earlier life, but that to your surprise now seems absolutely perfect. The only truth that can never be a lie, let me tell you, is life itself-- the thing that happens.

Ben Marcus, from "The Father Costume"

My father's costumes were gray and long and of the finest pile, sometimes clear enough for us to see through, though there was no reason to look too closely at that man's body. He preferred not to move. He was not one for excursions. My brother and I accomplished most of the required motion for him: we collected and described the daily food, oiled the Costume Gun, gathered yarn each morning after a storm, and donated any leftover swatches of fabric into our mother's kill hole out on the back platform.

At most, my father would throw handfuls of our mother's fabrics in the morning and study how they fell, diagrams in cloth that could have meant anything. His body was hunched and foreign. He grimaced with each gesture, his face often partially adorned with cotton bracings. When the disarray proved baffling to him, he brought in my brother for consultations. I sat on the bench and watched them crouch at their work. I could not read fabric. I had a language problem. My brother spoke a language called Forecast. It consisted of sounds he barked into a stippled leather box. When my father wrapped my brother's hands in cotton waffling, my brother could tap out a low-altitude language on the floor, short thuds of speech that my father held his listening jar to. On the short nights when the sky was stretched too tight and the birds struck against it like pebbles on our roof, my brother slept off his Forecast expulsions in a sling hanging from our door. He cried softly inside his mesh bag while I dotted our windowsills with listening utensils, in case a message came in the night.

Emerson, from "Self-Reliance and Other Essays"

As to the Miracle, too, of poetry. There is truly but one miracle, the perpetual fact of Being and Becoming, the ceaseless saliency, the transit from the vast to the particular, which miracle, one and the same has for its most universal name the word God.