New Hampshire - Who Knew?

It's a perfect early autumn late afternoon. Clear skies. This is the Laconia Public Library. It's just gorgeous.

"You do look, my son, in a moved sort...

...As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.
Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose. A turn or two I'll walk
To still my beating mind."

                                William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

"When I look back now...

...on what happened I see mainly fragments, flashes, a momentary phantasmagoria in which everyone focused on some different aspect and nobody at all saw the whole."
                               - Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted, p. 203

"In a deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet...

...in the valley, there is a young woman reading. Every day, before starting work, I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass. In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven."

                             Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, p. 169

"From these many books I am reading...

...at random, I absorb a quantity of ideas and impressions which are in constant fermentation. Every moment of dreaming adds color to imaginings. For hours, some days, I sit and ask myself, what do I want to write, what am I fit to write?
     The pure novel does not seem free enough. I have a feverish desire to invent a form for myself, to follow my inclinations, my impulses, to give free play to the queerness within me. For I repress my queerness. There is a fund of respectability in me, a sort of puritan literary conscience which looks suspiciously on the dancing flames."

   The Early Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Three (1923-1927), hardcover, p.143

"At a certain time of night...

there's no longer any noise around the house. With the low tide so far away from the room all you can hear is the regular beat of the surf, without any echo. While this respite lasts there's no barking of dogs or rattle of trucks. It's after the last walkers go by, just before daylight, that the hours become void of substance, mere empty spaces, sands of pure transience..."
                           
                                     Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair, p. 103-4

"She reached the square...

...and wandered through the chaos, her movements synchronizing themselves to the rhythms of mystical Gnawa music as she dodged motorbikes and acrobats. Billows of grilled-meat smoke gusted thick as houses on fire, teenage boys whispered 'hashish,' and costumed water-sellers clamored 'Photo! Photo!' At a distance, she spotted the hunchback shape of Izil among the henna artists and street dentists."

                           Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone 
                           from Chapter 13, The Graverobber