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William Blake really is important, my cornerstone. Nobody ever told me before he did that childhood was such a damned serious business.
Sep 10, 2025
Now I'm 'Blake Lewis' to the world, but I will always still be Bshorty from Bothell... I've never looked at it like a competition so I think I've won regardless. I won when I got to the top ten; I've already reached my goal.
The best compliment I can give Blake is just to say that if I hadn't inherited him as the quarterback, he would have been a kid I would have recruited. I think he has all the tools to be very successful in our system.
If Blake said that, said Father Brian, he never lived in Dublin.
One thing I know that's really cool - it seems to me that Blake Schwarzenbach [Jets to Brazil frontman; ex-Jawbreaker] is someone who's made music that's people continue to take really personally.
Not that I knew who you were until last month. But now that I've got you, I'm not letting you go." "You're not?" Blake stared at her in irritated confusion. What was her game? "Do you think I'm an idiot?" he spat out. "No," she said. "I've just escaped from a den of idiots, so I'm well familiar with the breed, and you're something else entirely. I am, however, hoping you're not a terribly good shot.
I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
That's the tricky thing about being bonded to someone for life. Blake and his dad are bonded like I'm bonded with Erin. We're irrevocably tied together by history, a history that can never be erased. Even if you want to deny it, even it you want to pretend it never existed, it will always be a part of you. It will always, in some way, define who you are.
If Anderson was the good cop, and Blake was the bad cop, Jamaal was the complete psycho cop.
Blake smiled radiantly. ʺMay I call you Vasilisa?ʺ ʺYou can call me Lissa.ʺ ʺYou can also,ʺ added Christian, ʺlet go of her hand now.
Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.
Get up guys. We’ve got a visit to pay.” “What are you talking about?” “I am not hanging out with Blake Lazar again.
Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together...he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That's why he was lonely.
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
It's God - I recognised him from Blake's picture.
Casey Blake (a former Minnesota Twin, now with the Indians) is a good friend of mine, I'd like to see the Indians win.
In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.
The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes- thank God these people don't actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already.
I'll miss you forever.' Blake - Devil To Pay
Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
Blake took a small roll from the tray on the table, then put it back in favor of a larger one. And maybe a little butter. It certainly couldn't hurt. And jam...no, he drew the line at jam. She was a spy, after all.
Blakes Hotel in South Kensington was a particular favourite of mine during what I affectionately think of as my Restless Years.
With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.
I started understanding William Blake and George Orwell more and more. It's amazing how we go to school when we're so young, read all of these books, just trying to memorize them. When you start to live, you don't have to memorize anything.
The older I get, the less I am bothered by talk like that. I have total faith in my coach Yohan Blake, total faith.
Sometimes, I think there's a lack of ambition in me. But then sometimes, I think, no, you can, like William Blake said, you know, see heaven in a grain of sand. If you look really, really closely at a situation, you can find almost endless interest in it.
The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger's words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake's The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn't do it. In the end, I did it myself.
Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.
Johnny Jewel is how people were maybe two hundred years ago. Back then, when people got up in the morning, they knew what they had to do to get through the day - there were 100% less decisions. Nowadays, we have to decide what we want to buy in grocery stores, what job to take, what work to do. But not Johnny. For him, it's all right there - it's a freer state, and that's what my music is looking for... ... To understand Johnny, you should think of William Blake. He was the same kinda guy.
Most of the time when we do a tune, Bad Blake, it's a tune no one's heard of to begin with.
Blake said that the body was the soul's prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the 'windows of the soul.' When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experence.
There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
I havent seen a professional player come out of New York in over 20 years since my brother Patrick came out. Blake spent a few years in Harlem, but he moved to Connecticut when he was a kid.
I think either Robert Blake wither pulled the trigger or hired someone to do it, but it will be a tough case to prove. I think there's a very good chance he may take the stand, and that's what I'm waiting for.
I don't understand the United Nations. They have selected Iran to sit on the U.N.'s women's rights panel. Iran! Also on the panel - Ben Roethlisberger, Chris Brown, Phil Spector, Robert Blake and committee chairman O.J. Simpson.
I'm not sure I'm going to be that type of artist but I do love cultural icons. Like Solange has been really great at that. Releasing her album end of last year and being really strong in their sound, bands like Little Dragon, artists like James Blake. You know their music when you hear them. They have a really particular sound and it's really cultural and people copy that sound. You hear it in other songs and you're like 'That's a James Blake tune'.
Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy.
The Country Music Awards were held Wednesday night at Universal City. The best country songs are always about drinking and guns and love gone wrong. Next year they're giving Robert Blake the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid.... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.
Hopefully I can inspire lots of people to learn about [Patti Smith], to read poetry or learn about William Blake or Arthur Rimbaud.
It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.
I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
When it comes to fully understanding how to strategically move all the pieces on the marketing and distribution chess board on a worldwide basis, Jeff Blake is always thinking two moves ahead and that gives Sony a true competitive edge. He is the studio's secret weapon and while he would be the first to credit his fantastic sales and marketing team, there are few executives here that deserve more credit for our successes during the past several years than Jeff.
My mom had this inate ability. Whatever town my mother moved to, the second she walked into town, she would instantly attract the alpha loser of that town. This guy was not a good guy. This guy was half O.J. Simpson and half O.J. Simpson. Scott Peterson sprinkles on the top, a side of Robert Blake. You know, not a good guy.
There are only two things you can do when you're dressed like Barbie Does Bondage; you can be embarrassed or you can be aggressive. Guess what my choice was.
Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.
Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. "He who desires but acts not," wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, "Breeds pestilence.
There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.