Excerpts "Loose Ends" Dwight Garner. "What Writers Say about Plague Season" NYT April 12, 2020

NYT Today.  Selected Quotes from . “What Writers Say About Plague Season: Loose Ends, Dwight Garner.

“It was an uncertain Spring”, Virginia Woolf. “The Years”.

“Lord! How sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people.”  Samuel Pepys, Diary

“A friend of mine says this is the beginning of the end of the global order." – Rachel Cusk. “Coventry”.

“One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.” – Gwendolyn Brooks, “in the Mecca”.

“That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious diseases.” Don De Lillo “The Angel Esmeralda”

“All is infection, mother…We shall sit quietly in this room, and I think we will be spared…” Rita Dove, “Fiammetta Breaks Her Peace”.

“I have always thought of the whole of life as a kind of disaster area.” J.G. Ballard, “The Drought”.

“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”  - Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre.

“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.” – Clive James, “Latest Readings”.

"No restaurants?  The means of consoling oneself: reading cookbooks.” -Attributed to Charles Baudelaire.

“Make up your mind to drink wine in quantity.” Kingsley Amis, “On Drink”.

“If you are solitary, be not idle”.  Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell’s “the Life of Samuel Johnson”.

“Life’s tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars’ worth of euphoria go the distance.” – Stanley Elkin, “Pieces of soap”. ‘