Thread: Memorable Passages

“Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.”

― David Thomson, In Camden Town

It is only our exactions of life that are terrible. It is only our impossible conceptions of beauty and good and justice that are terrible--because they never are realized, and at the same time they prevent us taking life as it is. That is the real source of all our sorrow and suffering.

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

William Faulkner

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

Gabriel Garcํia Marquez

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Dag Hammarskj๖ld

Maturity: among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.

Dag Hammarskj๖ld

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Sinclair Lewis

I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.

Thomas Mann

But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

Eugene O'Neill

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

Bernard Shaw

Generally speaking, all the people of the so-called upper classes do not live a true, real life. Below us something always happens, there is the struggle for life, for bread, a life full of diligent work, animal necessities, appetites, passions, everyday efforts,--a palpable life, which roars, leaps, and tumbles like ocean waves, and we are sitting eternally on terraces, discussing art, literature, love, women; strangers to that other life far removed from it, obliterating, out of the seven, the six work-days. Without being conscious of it, our inclinations, nerves, and soul are fit only for holidays. Immersed into blissful dilettantism as in a warm bath, we are half awake, half dreaming. Consuming leisurely our wealth, and our inherited supply of nerves and muscles, we gradually lose our foothold upon the soil.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

This is the last lecture I am giving you. From next class on, I will only respond to your questions. This course has plenty of readings. If you don't have questions, it is either because you have not done your reading, or you are too stupid to be in this course.




Herbert Simon

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

John Steinbeck

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

John Steinbeck

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

Mother Teresa

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more

Winston Churchill

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

Anatole France

The most decisive actions of our life--I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future--are, more often than not, unconsidered.

Andr้ Gide

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”
― Eric Hoffer

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Let us live and love, nor give a damn what sour old men say.
The sun that sets may rise again, but when our light has sunk into the earth it is gone forever.”
― Catullus

“You think I'm a sissy?
I will sodomize you and face-fuck you.”
― Catullus, The Complete Poems

“His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labour that brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labour that brought him only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the orchestra everything under heaven except melody.”
― Willa Cather, The Troll Garden: Short Stories

“One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn’t done anything wrong, wasn’t even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn’t stop. And when I finally did stop, I’d expended all this energy and frustration, and I’m thinking what in God’s sweet name did I do.”
― Gail A. Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, And Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry