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

“Surely a bitter hatred of London is becoming a mark of those that love the arts, and all that have this hatred should help anything that looks like a beginning of a centre of art elsewhere.” [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. “people are ready to journey from all parts of England and Scotland and Ireland, and even from America, to live with their favourite art as shut away from the world as though they were ‘in retreat,’ as Catholics say.”
  5. “William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him.”