Remarks by William Sharp | V2Melody Quotations

“I cling to my Sunshine Creed—to live sunnily, to think blithely, to act on the square even in my sinning, and to try to give sunshine to others.”

A late resolve to choose light after illness · Letter to E. C. Stedman

“Reason is sometimes transcended by Emotion—sufficiently often to prevent philosophers from deriding the idea that a truth may be reached emotionally.”

Feeling defended as a way of knowing, not a lapse from it · Letter to John Elder, October 1879

“In some things I am more a woman than a man.”

Early admission of a nature that loved past the usual male reserve · Letter to John Elder

“There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two people are here: so intimate and yet so far-off.”

The dual self felt as companionship on a lonely crossing · Letter to Elizabeth Sharp, Arran ferry, 1895

“I do not think the needs or nuances of one art should ever be imposed upon the free movement of another in alliance.”

Giving a composer leave to reshape verses for song · Letter as Fiona Macleod to Helen Hopekirk

“If ever a book came out of the depths of a life it is this.”

Claiming the work as lived, not invented · Letter on The Dominion of Dreams

“Too much of the book is born out of the incurable heartache, the nostalgia for impossible things.”

Naming the ache that fed the later Fiona prose · Letter on The Dominion of Dreams

“Let the ignoble pass, and the noble remain.”

A New Year resolve stripped to one moral cut · Letter signed Fiona to William

“Let us not only beautifully dream but achieve in beauty.”

Dream without making was, for him, unfinished work · Letter signed Fiona to William, New Year

“Every morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the world.”

A Highland habit of reverence he made his own by retelling · Recalled words of Seumas Macleod, the old fisherman he loved to quote

“I know Keats far better through his letters than by even the ablest and most intimate memoirs.”

Letters as the nearest approach to a living voice · Quoted by Elizabeth Sharp as his own words

“A group of intimate letters will probably give us more insight into the inner nature of a man than any number of hypothetical pros and cons on the part of a biographer.”

Why he trusted letters over formal lives · Quoted by Elizabeth Sharp as his own words

“I know from something beyond and out of myself that we are now but dying to live, and that there is no death.”

Death as a child's dream in a weary night · Letter after Rossetti's death

“As God lives, the soul dies not.”

Grief answered by a refusal of annihilation · Letter after the death of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

“We are never alone, though we are rarely conscious of other presences.”

His lifelong sense that the air is peopled · Note on the poem In Dean Cemetery

“People won't be preached to. Truth can be inculcated far better by inference, by suggestion.”

On art as hint rather than sermon · Letter to Elizabeth Sharp, 1879

“The gloom, the streets, the obtrusion and intrusion of people, all conspire against thought, dream, true living.”

Crowds as the enemy of inward life · Letter, January 1895

“London, I do not like, though I feel its magnetic charm, or sorcery. I suffer here.”

The city as a spell that still starves thought and dream · Letter, January 1895

“Without her there would have been no Fiona Macleod.”

Crediting the woman who unlocked the second self · Letter to Elizabeth Sharp on Edith Rinder

“To betray publicly the private life and constrained ideal of that inward self for a reward's sake would be a poor collapse.”

Refusing money and fame if they cost Fiona's isolation · Letter to Alexander Hood

“I believe that a spirit has breathed to me, or entered me, or that my soul remembers or has awakened.”

His spiritualist account of the Fiona presence · Letter to Alexander Hood

“The genesis of Fiona Macleod was no literary adventure, but a deep spiritual impulse.”

Insisting the second name was vocation, not a trick · Letter to Alexander Hood

“I am sure no kings have so royal a life as the plovers and curlews have.”

Wild birds as the true royalty of the earth · Letter

“I wish I could live all my hours out of doors: I envy no one in the world so much as the red deer, the eagle, the sea-mew.”

Longing to shed the human lot for a creature's freedom · Letter

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