At Stratford-on-Avon in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“In London the first man one meets puts any high dream out of one’s head, for he will talk to one of something at once vapid and exciting, some one of those many subjects of thought that build up our social unity. But here he gives back one’s dream like a mirror.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “those who care for the arts have few near friendships among those that do not”
  2. “It is certainly one’s fault if one opens a newspaper”
  3. “I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore, when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones, as if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even a little dust under one’s feet.”
  4. “One man tells how the theatre and the library were at their foundation but part of a scheme the future is to fulfil. To them will be added a school where speech, and gesture, and fencing, and all else that an actor needs will be taught”
  5. “The people my mind’s eye has seen have too much of the extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art before our crowded life had brought moderation and compromise, to seem more than a dream, and yet all else has grown dim before them.”