twenty-fifth poem

P.S.: Do you in constructing your books generally have that idea of coherence in mind?

Wright: Every time. Did I mention to you Robert Frost's remark — it is a very Horatian remark — that if you have a book of twenty-four poems, the book itself should be the twenty-fifth? And I have tried that every time, every time.

—James Wright, interview with Peter Stitt, James Wright: A Profile (Logbridge-Rhodes, Inc., 1988) edited by Frank Graziano and Peter Stitt.

architectural book

...a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades and domes.

—Viginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

astonished to finish

I am always astonished when I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me until I get started. But I distract myself and do it. What I achieve is a product in me, not by applying my will but by giving into it. I begin because I'm not motivated to think; I conclude because I haven't the nerve to leave off. The book is my act of cowardice.

—Fernando Pessoa, "Always Astonished: A Journal," Always Astonished: Selected Prose (City Lights Books, 1988), translated by Edwin Honig

tears on the pages

Around 1000 A.D., when the Magyars were being converted over to
    Christianity, Magyar children were forced to attend school for the first
    time in their cultural history: "therefore the Magyar word konyv means
    tears as well as book."

—Albert Goldbarth, from “Library,” Saving Lives (Ohio State U. Press, 2001)

physical object

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are merely symbols—spring to life and we have the resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Borges’ Norton Lectures at Harvard, HUP, 2000)

what is literature...

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

—Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)