Formula Drift

Famous quotes containing the words formula and/or drift:

    Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.
    Thomas Mann (18751955)

    To drift with every passion till my soul
    Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
    Is it for this that I have given away
    Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
    Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
    Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)