Pensées

Saki: "Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me. They remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like -- and during the rest of the meal one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres."

Leon Trotsky, several months before his assassination: "Natasha has just opened the window wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full."

William James: "The true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent me which I seek. . . . Optimism leads to power."

Freud: "In our innermost soul we are children and remain so for the rest of our lives."

B.F. Skinner: "The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested."

John Cleese, twice divorced: "I don't regret any of the time I've spent in my marriages or other relationships. So if I finish up being married five times for seven years each time, that for me will probably be more interesting than once for 35 years. I know you're not supposed to say that, but why not?"

T.S. Eliot: "Teach us to care, and not to care."

Geoffrey Graham, 42, Austin artist and Gay Rights activist dying of AIDS: "I have no fear of death. It's a natural part of life. I trust the universe enough not to be fearful."

S.I. Hayakawa: "We are so enamored of words that we forget that the magic of words in the great writers comes from the fact that they thought earnestly, felt deeply, and observed accurately, the world of not-words. We, however, often give our students the impression that literature has less to do with representing human life and experiencing truly than with dressing it up for show."

Lérmontov: "He in his madness prays for storms, / And dreams that storms will bring him peace."

Donald Barthelme: "Art is not difficult because it wants to be difficult, rather because it wants to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are not longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens."

Maya Angelou: "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without it we can't practice any other virtue. I wish I had said that first. Aristotle said it."

Mike Reid, teary after blowing his lead in the PGA: "That's O.K. I cry at supermarket openings. . . . Sports is like life with the volume turned up."

Emily Dickinson: "The Brain is wider than the Sky."

Robert Penn Warren (1962): "If you aren't a crook, you ought to give up writing. . . . Never do anything [in writing] for one reason only."

Frederick Pottle: "Wordsworth had too vocational an attitude toward his talent."

Walpole: "Life is a tragedy to the man who feels and comedy to the man who thinks." [see way below for a French source.]

Wallace Stevens: "Nobility is a violence from within. It is imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."

Sidney(?): "I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse."

Charles Peirce: "Not to beat about the bush, let us come to close quarters. Experience is our only teacher. How does experience teach? As a series of surprises."

Freud: "The meager satisfaction we can draw from reality leaves us starving."

Ezra Pound: "The trouble with being an American is that one has a tendency to overvalue Europe."

Robert Frost: "Poetry lifts suffering to a higher plane of regard."

Caryn James: "Weapons of the Spirit is not one of the best-made films about the Holocaust, but the astonishing story it tells and the memories it preserves are beyond value."

Bill Stott: "I don't have to live up to an ideal, even if it's mine. . . . I am alive now, and I will never be frightened again."

Alfred North Whitehead: "Unless society is permeated, through and through, with routine, civilization vanishes. . . . Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness."

Frederick Wiseman: "If you hang around long enough, you stumble onto sequences that are funnier, more dramatic, and sadder than anything you can find, except in really great novels. You're not inventing them. You're just lucky enough to be there when they happen."

Aaron Copland: "Agony I don't connect with. Not even alienation."

Richard A. Shweder, NYTBR, 9/21/86: "By the time we finish reading a good ethnography, adroit rationalization has made familiar what a first seems strange, the other, and has estranged us from what we thought we knew, ourselves."

Samuel Butler: "All of the animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it."

George Stoney: "Forgiveness is far easier to obtain than permission."

Carl Jung: "The great thing is here and now, this is the eternal moment, and if you do not realize it, you have missed the best part of your life. . . . Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other. . . . All excessive purity lacks vitality."

Harry Wilmer: "Our personality is a compromise between what we wish to be and what the surrounding world will allow us to be. . . . Both intuition and sensation are ways of perceiving. On the other hand, thinking and feeling are ways of evaluating."

Ortega y Gasset: "Life is fired at us point-blank. Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we are born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim."

Virgil Thomson: "I can describe things and persons, narrate facts. But I do not assemble my pictures and my people into situations where they take on memorability, which is what storytellers do. Nor can I make language change its sound or words their meaning, which is the faculty of poets. Language, to me, is merely for telling the truth about something."

Harry A. Wilmer, Practical Jung: Nuts and Bolts of Jungian Psychotherapy, Chiron Publications, 1987.

"Falling in love is the unreal idealization of the other, / a marvelous enchantment, a spellbinding fascination / with the image of the other. /
Falling in love is conceptualized as reciprocal anima-animus projections. /
It is this which draws people into relationships / by creating a fantasy relatedness. / [45] The inner image carried by the psyche is / projected onto a real other person and never quite fits. / But it is a good approximation. / As time goes on and the glorious idealization / begins to be seen in the light of the real other person, / the projections are withdrawn. / Some people pretend this doesn't happen, / and a sham love relationship results, / but for others the withdrawal of projections / is the beginning of a real relationship -- / affinity instead of infatuation, / deep caring instead of blind adoration. / This is the beginning of individuation and growth / in the relationship."

[46] "A middle-aged man was telling me a hassle / over making his adolescent son's lunch. / I asked him why he didn't let his son make his own lunch. / He turned on me with condescending hostility: / 'And when did you start making your own lunch?' / 'Not soon enough.'"

[46] Jung: "Try to live without the ego. Whatever must come to you, will come. Don't worry. . . . The realization of stillness, which is truly the Self."

[Jung, CW, 7:111] "We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not, and never will be, a creature of reason alone, a fact to be noted by all pedantic culture-mongers. The irrational cannot be and must not be extirpated. The gods cannot and must not die." [Jung, CW, 5:581] "The best is most threatened with some devilish perversion just because it has done the most to suppress evil."

[Jung, Dream Analysis, vol. 3, page 26] "One's greatest foolishness is one's biggest stepping stone. No one can become a wise man without being a terrible fool. Through Eros one learns the truth, through sins we learn virtue. Meister Eckhard says that one shouldn't repent too much, that the value of sin is very great."

[129] "This moment is the only reality / we will ever know. / Fully lived it is our whole life."

[Jung, Letters III, Feb. 17, 1961, four months before his death] "In judging my writings, I can only remark that I have written every book with the utmost responsibility, that I have been honest, and that I have pointed out facts which remain valid. I would not want to withdraw any of my publications and I stand by all that I have written."

Dorman David, a former drug addict, ne'er-do-well, and convict, speaking of John Jenkins's early days as a poker player [NYer, 10/30/89, pg. 96]: "He was up and coming, but he was always overplaying his hand. It was his ego problem, which is the only reason you lose at poker or anything else. The ego problem is all there is to deal with in life. First you have to be able to see it, and then you have to be able to deal with it."

Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain, Knopf, 1989, p. 66. "If I misbehaved, my parents simply acted as though I were not their child but a stranger. They would inquire civilly as to who I was and what I was doing on Coorain, but no hint of recognition escaped them. This treatment never failed to reduce me to abject contrition. In later life my recurring nightmares were always about my inability to prove to people I knew quite well who I was. I became an unnaturally good child, and accepted uncritically that goodness was required of me if my parents' disappointments in life were ever to be compensated for."

Edward Fitzgerald, Omar Khayyám, lxxii: "Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire / To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, / Would we not shatter it to bits -- and then / Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées: "That we are in ourselves hateful, reason alone will convince us; and yet there is no religion but the Christian which teaches us to hate ourselves; wherefore no other religion can be entertained by those who know themselves to be worthy of nothing but hatred."

Aristotle: "To think like a wise man, but to express oneself like the common people."

Eric Hoffer: "It is safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem."

Goethe: "Everything has been thought of before; the difficulty is to think of it again."

Jacquelyn Small: "There is nothing that has to be done -- there is only someone to be."

General Jaruzelski: "One must finally draw the line between creativity and artistic trash."

Kennedy Fraser (NY, 11/6/89; pg. 154): "Honest personal writing is a great service rendered the living by the dead."

John Berger: "Most unhappiness is like illness in that it too exacerbates a sense of uniqueness."

Byron: "I cannot exist without some object of love." [11/9/1812] "I will promise not to make love to you unless you like it." [6/8/1814]

JFK: "I wonder how it is with you, Harold [Macmillan]? If I don't have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache."

Duc de la Rochefoucauld: "If we hadn't been told about love, we never would have discovered it." [approximate] "If they hadn't told us about love, we would never have discovered it."

Fra Giovanni: "There is nothing I can give you that you do not have, but there is much that, though I cannot give it, you can take. // No heaven will come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven. // No peace lies in the future that is not hidden in the present moment. Take peace. // The world's gloom is but a cloud; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy. // And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the days breaks and the clouds fly away."

Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton visited the first Nazi concentration camp, Ohrdruf, west of Leipzig, liberated by the U.S. 4th Armored Division on April 4, 1945. The commanding American officer forced the mayor of Ohrdrug and his wife to tour the camp; they went home and committed suicide by slashing their wrists. Bradley writes about the visit in his memoirs: "A guard showed us how the blood had congealed in the coarse scabs where the starving prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food." Patton got sick. Ike insisted on seeing the entire camp and then ordered soldiers of the nearby military units to see it, saying, "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against."

Jerome Miller, The Way of Suffering, p. 106: "Generally, we might say that, in order for shame to get through to a person, it must persuade him to take the worth of something Other than himself so seriously that the wrong of not reverencing it becomes devastating."

William James: "I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: 'This is the real me!'"

Cyril Connolly: "Infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator. . . . In spite of our decreasing charms we sweep young people off their feet, for young people do not understand themselves, and fortunately for us, can still be hypnotised by those who do."

Ben Franklin: "What one relishes, nourishes."

V.S. Pritchett: "Nothing in this genre [autobiography] lasts unless it is done with art. . . . There is no credit in living; the credit is being able to specify experience."

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: An "'unending conversation' . . . is going on in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you . . . The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the conversation still vigorously in progress."

After the Civil War, Robert E. Lee was asked by a woman to hold her infant son so that he could tell his grandchildren he was held by Lee. Lee held the infant. The mother asked what advice he would give her to bring the boy up better. "Teach him to deny himself," Lee said.

The suicide of David Rappaport, a 3-foot 11-inch dwarf and TV character actor, was reported in the NYT 5/4/90. In a 1988 interview, Rappaport said he was discriminated against because of his height. "I want to be treated like a regular, boring, normal person. I look at boring people every day, and I say, 'God, I wish I could be like that.' But my lot is to unique, special, so I have to put up with it. It's a hard life."

Edmund Burke (1775): "All protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a form of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in New England is a refinement of the principle of resistance: it is the dissent of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion."

Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel, English trans. 1961: "Hitler had the great merit of producing a simplification of the emotions, of calling forth a wholly unequivocal No, a clear and deadly hatred. The years of struggle against him had been morally a good era."

New York Times obit for "John Bowlby, Psychiatric Pioneer on Mother-Child Bond," 9/14/90: "In his major work, a three-volume exploration of the bond between the mother and child, Dr. Bowlby argued that the origins of many emotional problems in later life were a result of children's being separated as toddlers from their mothers, with no adequate substitute. // The problems such separation could lead to, he said, included depression, 'anxious attachment' or clinginess in relationships, chronic delinquency, and pathological mourning. . . . Dr. Bowlby saw emotional problems in later life as arising from actual childhood events, like being deprived of mothering, rather than from unconscious fantasies."

Frederick Wiseman says his films are "subjective 'fiction' based in 'reality.'"

Margaux Hemingway: "You can't argue with a sober person."

Robert Bly: "Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us."

Fats Waller, on how to make women happy: "Find out what they want and how they want it, and give it to them just that way."

Cary Grant: "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."

Paul Monette: "I know men who are HIV positive and who don't care about their careers anymore but desperately want to find a real relationship. Before they get sick they yearn to find someone who will know them to the core."

Thomas Carlyle: "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness."

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: "One just has to be oneself. That's my basic message. The moment you accept yourself as you are, all burdens, all mountainous burdens, simply disappear. Then life is a sheer joy, a festival of lights."

Oscar Wilde: "The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered."

Saul Alinsky: "He who fears corruption fears life."

Lin Yutang: "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."

Eudora Welty: "All serious daring starts from within."

Albert Einstein: "I now bask in that solitude which was so painful to me as a youth."

Maxim Gorky: "In Chekhov's presence everyone felt a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself."

Angelus Silsius, a Protestant mystic: "I know that without me God can't live a moment."

Jung: "The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful." [He was writing Freud, which he did in a tone of amazing servility. That accounts for the "it seems to me."] "It is not I who create myself; rather I happen to myself." "So long as the Self is unconscious, it corresponds to Freud's superego and is a source of perpetual moral conflict. If it is withdrawn from projection, however, and is no longer identical with public opinion then one is truly one's own yea and nay. The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible to imagine."

Admiral William J. Crowe, NYT 11/29/90): "It's curious that some expect our military to train soldiers to stand up to hostile fire but doubt its ability to occupy ground and wait patiently."

Lisette Model: "The most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated." "It is not the students who are young; I have to teach them to be young."

Gide: "It's strange, not to say disconcerting, how my entire being is determined by the opinion someone else has of it." [Gide was already in his 50s, maybe 60s, when he wrote this.]

Howard Korder: "The basic dynamics between the sexes are essentially unchanged. Men pursue women and, having conquered, pursue other women. Women stand there and wonder why."

Freud: "Life, as it is imposed upon us, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, insoluble tasks."

Albert Camus: "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

Philip Roth, The Counterlife: "He is in crazy flight, I thought, from the folly of sex, from the intolerable disorder of virile pursuits and the indignities of secrecy and betrayal, from the enlivening anarchy that overtakes anyone who even sparingly abandons himself to uncensored desire. . . . Certainly a life of writing books is a trying adventure in whch you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way."

Diana Arbus: "The very process of posing requires a person to step out of himself as if he were an object."

Joe Sparks: "If it flies or floats or fucks, rent it."

Pirandello: "One cannot choose what he writes: one can only choose to face it."

Philip Glass, who came to Austin in 1988 after having just spoken in Laramie, WY: "After you get to be well known, you get to play in really small places."

Alice Miller: "Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self."

NYT 1/15/90: "Asked how he felt about the possibility, even the likelihood, that he would soon be at war, Corporal Connor took the notebook out of a reporter's hand, stared out the gunner's window, and wrote, 'Like I want to return to my wife and make babies.'"

Bill Stott: "How easily we might have escaped! The door was always unlocked. We were holding it closed and screaming that we wanted out." "Be whatever feels right."

Valery: "An artist chooses even when he confesses. Perhaps above all when he confesses."

Staff Sgt. Hattie Brown, a radio operator who relays battle reports to headquarters from the field (NYT 1/22/91): "I've confronted the idea of death and I try not to be scared. If I die, though, I hope I do it with pride, trying to get the enemy."

C.S. Lewis: "The Unicorn said as he entered the real Narnia, 'I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Come further up. Come further in!" (Presumably from The Last Battle; engraved on a bench near the grave of Cory Daniel Dennis 10/11/73 - 6/29/83)

Natalia Ginzburg, "My Vocation," The Little Virtues: "We are constantly threatened with grave dangers whenever we write a page. There is the danger of suddenly starting to be flirtatious and of singing. I always have a crazy desire to sing and I have to be very careful that I don't."

Sam Shepherd, of the NY avant-garde art scene of the 1960s, quoted in Kroll, pg. 71: "Most of these people had a self-destructive streak. And it was very contagious, this feeling that in order to be a true, honest, heroic artist you had to do yourself in or go bananas, so that your insanity became a badge of honor. Why was it necessary to be insane or self-destructive in order to be creative? I knew guys who walked off roofs. I didn't want to go that route."

Elie Wiesel wrote a review of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird for the NYT. "I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography, I tore up my review and wrote one a thousand times better."

George Delacorte, publisher who died at 97, NYT obit 5/5/91: “Mr. Delacorte was an avid storyteller in his later years. One day, however, when he was in the middle of an anecdote he lost his train of thought. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘at 92 the memory is the first thing to go.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, the first thing that goes is sex. Then you memory goes. But the memory of sex never goes.’”

Bernard Holland, NYT, 6/11/91: "Mr. [Burton] Lane played the piano and sang, interweaving 'Wunderbar' and 'It Was Just One of Those Things.' ¶ It was perhaps the evening most potent moment -- the voice scratchy, cracking and incomplete but supported by a sophisticated fervor and a timing that grasped the music whole. Ms. [Patricia?] Morison [sic] gave us this same sense of vulnerability, of passionate souls that reach for vocal effects just beyond their reach and lay their shortcomings hopefully at the listener's feet. It is one of American popular music's great gifts to musical culture."

Lord Byron, Oct. 26, 1819 letter to friend: "As to Don Juan, confess, confess -- you dog -- and be candid -- that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing -- it may be bawdy -- but is it not good English? -- it may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? -- Could any man have written it -- who has not lived in the world? -- and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? -- and under it?"

Glenn Gould said that one could learn to be a concert pianist in a matter of hours if one could concentrate sufficiently.

W.S. Di Piero, on Gustave Courbet, in Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art: "For a long time Western artists expressed their sense of the sacred by depicting the shared subject matter of Christendom, which connected them to their audience. [Mircea] Eliade says that the sacred, in all times, is 'the revelation of the real, an encounter with that which saves us by giving meaning to our existence.' The emergence of nature, I mean of the natural sublime, in eighteenth-century painting, by which time traditional scriptural subject matter had dissipated into mannered pieties, was a reclaiming of the sacred. For Courbet and later realists, the purest revelation of the real was in the physical world, in what Courbet called the concrete, especially in human toil, in the material fastness of landscape, in the luminous sexual gravity of the female form."

Fritz Perls, from In and Out the Garbage Pail:
Quoting a "distinguished, patriarchal" Austrian psychoanalyst, Paul Federn, in the 1920s: "You just can't fuck enough" ("Man kann gar nicht genug vögeln").
Another analyst, asked by Perls what he thought of the various Freudian schools, replied: "They all make money."
"Compulsive repetition ... remains a constant source of attention and stress just because the gestalt has no closure, just because the situation remains unfinished, just because the wound will not heal. // The compulsive repetition is not death-directed, [as Freud claimed] but life-directed. It is a repeated attempt to cope with a difficult situation. The repetitions are investments toward the completion of a gestalt in order to free one's energies for growth and development."
"The tension arising out of the need for closure is called frustration, the closure is called satisfaction. Satis - enough; facere - to make. Make it so that you have enough. In other words, fulfillment; fill yourself until you are full.
"Don't push the river; it flows by itself."
Satori.
Friend, don't be a perfectionist. Perfectionism is a curse and a strain. For you tremble lest you miss the bull's-eye. You are perfect if you let be. // Friend, don't be afraid of mistakes. Mistakes are not sins. Mistakes are ways of doing something different, perhaps creatively new. // Friend, don't be sorry for your mistakes. Be proud of them. You had the courage to give something of yourself. // It takes years to be centered; it takes more years to understand and be now. Until then, beware of both extremes, perfectionism as well as instant cure, instant joy, instant sensory awareness.
I am holding on to my credo: "I am responsible only for myself. You are responsible for yourself. I resent your demands on me, as I resent any intrusion into my way of being."
I think the pursuit of happiness is a fallacy. You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage. . . . It is impossible by the very nature of awareness to be continuously happy.
Do we identify with our true self or with the demands of otherness, including the demands of a self-image? These demands from the environment put us into a a position of reacting rather than acting, expressing, outgoing.

Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, Real People Press, 1969.
Epigraph: "To suffer one's death and to be reborn is not easy." "The prayer in Gestalt Therapy": 'I do my thing, and you do your thing. / I am not in this world to live up to your expectations / And you are not in this world to live up to mine. / You are you and I am I, / And if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. / If not, it can't be helped.'"

John Keats, writing a friend after a severe illness: "How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy -- their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our Lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again."

André Malraux, quoted by Anna Quindlen, NYT 5/2/91: "The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell."

Carl Rogers: "What is most personal is most general."

William Carlos Williams: "Marriages tend to become incest. A wife is nine-tenths a sister or a mother without adulteries on both parts."

Charles Morgan, on Verlaine: "No arrow grazed him. They all went to the heart. Other men distinguished among the arrows, avoiding some, raising a shield against others. Verlaine did not distinguish, because, as an artist, he desired intuitively to be struck again and again."

Picasso: "To imitate others is necessary. To imitate oneself is pathetic. . . . It takes a long time to become young. . . . I'd like to live like a poor man with lots of money."

Terry Jenkins, Charles Laughton's last and best lover: "He wanted to live as all people do when they're in love, to live their life all over again with their loved one. . . . He wanted to go to Japan, because it was a country that he'd never been to."

Rilke: "How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

Hubert Humphrey: "Life's unfairness is not irrevocable. We can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves."

André Bresson: "A movie is born first in my head, dies on paper, is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but which, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again."

Samuel G. Freedman, book review, NYT 6/16/91: "A powerful book dwells within this manuscript, and the tragedy is that neither Ms. Gaines nor her editor could extract it from the surrounding self-indulgence."

Richard Rhodes in his Making Love quotes a comedienne who shouts, when she sees a 50-year-old man drive by in a sports car: "Sorry about your penis!"

Jean Sexton, an Orphan Train rider in 1914, speaking of her arrival in the Midwestern town where she was "chosen": "They marched us across a stage in the opera house. First, my two brothers got chosen. And then it was time to make my stage appearance. I was only three, and my mother tells me that I was wearing a little white dress that by that time was terribly wrinkled. So when I came out on the stage I was smoothing the wrinkles from my dress. And she called out, 'I want that one.'"

Mary McCarthy, quoting Orwell: "An autobiography that does not tell you something bad about the author cannot be any good."

Emerson: "Let us all be new-born Antinomians."

Jim Harrison: "The hardest thing for me to accept was that my life was what it was every day. This seemed to negate notions of grandeur necessary for an interest in survival. The bird that passes across the window is a reminder of the shortness of life, but it is mostly a bird flying past the window."

Brian Winston, "The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary," in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal, p. 284: "The fifty-year parade of the halt and the lame has patently done more good to the documentarists than it has to the victims."

Gunter Grass, NYT, 19/29/92: "What is deadly dangerous to literature is that in politics you have to repeat yourself, and literature and art are about the new and the innovative, about the undiscovered and the unvoiced. We must find ways to show responsibility to both."

Coco Chanel: "How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone."

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: "The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well."

Katharine Hepburn: "Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then."

Isadora Duncan: "The whole world is absolutely brought up on lies. We are fed nothing but lies."

First song from Juno: "They'll be gone, we'll survive, / Though they leave us half dead. / We're alive, we're alive / As the Old Woman said."

Dennis Byrd, a 26-year-old Jets lineman paralyzed in a game on 11/29/92, NYT 1/13/93; Byrd is a practicing Christian: "Asked if he had ever wondered, 'Why me?' Byrd replied: 'I know why me. Because of the strength on the inside. I know I can handle this.'"

Arthur Ashe: "I try to dangle on the court. The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight."

Louis Begley: "Certainly since Proust and Joyce, nobody who writes serious fiction has written anything that is not a sort of confession. Nobody has made a real character without there being to some extent an autoportrait."

Dennis Miller: "There's nothing wrong with being shallow so long as you're insightful about it."

Freya Stark, travel writer, died 5/9/93, age 100; her NYT obit 5/11/93: "At 93, as she was planning a trip to Spain, Dame Freya was asked about death. She replied, 'I feel about it as about the first ball, or the first meet of hounds, anxious as to whether one will get it right, and timid and inexperienced -- all the feelings of youth.'"

Marian Woodman, a Jungian: "The body is what makes us human. Those of us who have been brought up in a patriarchal world tend to stay in our heads. We want to stay with ideas. We want to put spirit ahead of body . . . We try to push all the parts of ourselves that we don't like into our bodies: our greed, our jealousy, our lust. All the darkness we don't want to accept, we push down into our muscles and bones and heart. We pretend we have no shadow and try to escape into our heads. Powerful energies are locked into our bodies; eventually they rebel, usually in illness."

Peter Ustinov: "Doubt is what connects us; certitude separates."

Shiva Purana: "Anyone who goes though life without honoring the phallus is truly pitiful, guilty and damned. If one weighs up on the one hand phallus worship and on the other charity, fasting, pilgrimages, sacrifices, and virtue, it is the worship of the phallus, the source of pleasure and liberation, offering protection against adversity, which is to be preferred. . . . The phallus . . . is the prime cause, the source of consciousness, the substance of the Universe."

Ze'ev Chafets, when told how lucky he was to be able to write fiction: "Everybody's got to have something. I wish I was 7 feet and could play in the NBA."

Schopenhauer: "If we weren't all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting we couldn't endure it."

Garrison Keillor: "My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at the time."

Tallulah Bankhead: "I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition.'

Carol Burnett: "I liked myself better when I wasn't me."

John Maynard Keynes: "I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal."

Virginia Woolf: "Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them."

Kurt Vonnegut: "I'd rather have written Cheers than anything I've written."

Eugene V. Debs: "While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Margaret Mead: "I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce."

John Cage: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it."

John F. Kennedy: "If I had my life to live over again, I would have a different father, a different wife and a different religion."

Alexandra Rheault, a life model (NYT 9/6/93): "When you model, the focus is completely on you, and some people really appreciate the attention, especially if they didn't get it growing up. You're being drawn; you're being looked at. There's a sense of acceptance that comes from that."

George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi": "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."

Carl Rogers: "Through accepting my own individuality, which I can't expect everyone else to recognize and pat me on the back for, I shape my goals and desires. I am not compelled to be a victim of unknown forces in myself. I am not compelled to be simply a creature of others, molded by their experiences or shaped by their demands."

Susan Froemke, a principal at Maysles Films Inc. in New York, "one of the oldest, best-known documentary film and reality-based commercial production companies" on their ads showing actual people using their own words ("Advertising," NYT, 11/26/93): "People will give you things a copywriter could never come up with. It's what we call the real golden moments. . . . Sometimes clients are afraid it's a little too real." Sam Telerico, executive producer at Maysles: "This involves an education process for clients, agencies, everyone. Often they don't realize what reality is and want to modify it, make it a little nicer." Henry Corra, a principal at Maysles: "A lot of commercials are unscripted, unmanipulated, but obviously, you have to manipulate to make it work in 30 seconds. Fiction is so a part of reality."

Stanley Diamond: "The issue is not one of going native, but of understanding the native in oneself."

Clifford Geertz: "All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession."

E. Jean Carroll (NYT, 1/24/94): "The only reason men have been put on earth is to shoot sperm at women. And because men are programmed this way, it's killing us. We have to stay tight, juicy and succulent because after we lose our eggs, no one is going to look at us. That's it. It's over. Forget it.... It's not O.K. to be older. We should just all blow our brains out."

Margo Jefferson (NYT, 9/15/93): "Memoirs are becoming the folk and fairy tales of our age. Where else can we record our quest for love, truth, honor or beauty so artfully and so nakedly?"

Harold Brodkey, NYer, 2/7/94: "Optimism. Hopefulness. . . . Franklin Roosevelt's speeches -- if you compare them with Churchill's, you can see what I'm talking about. You can see it in the rhythms and in the imagery and in the statements. Roosevelt proposed the four freedoms, and Churchill offered blood, toil, sweat, and tears."

Henry James: "The artistic lie is always preferably to the inartistic truth, except in journalism."

Gregory Bateson: “Objectivity means that you look very hard at what you choose to look at.”

John Henry [Cardinal] Newman: “In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to change often.”

Grace Paley, of Kay Boyle: “People will full sex lives don’t have regrets.”

Wallace Stevens: “The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but, on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception. . . . If we were all alike; if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi in unison, one poet would be enough. . . . But we are not all alike, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.” (OP, 266-67)

Erich Fromm: “Love is not primarily a relation to a specific person; it is the orientation of a person’s character toward the world as a whole.”

Oscar Wilde: “One should always be in love. That is why one should never marry.”

Margo Jefferson, NYT 6/22/94: “Unhappy families may not be alike, but they do have this in common: The parents tend to wish they had never married and the children tend to wish they had never been born. No one has to say it, they just live it.”

James Thurber: “Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.”

Norman Mailer, “The White Negro” (1957): “One is Hip or one is Square. One is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”

Jorge Luis Borges: “I, too, if I may mention myself, have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny -- that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.”

Oliver Stone, of O.J. Simpson, after the murder of Simpson’s wife (NYer 8/8/94): “The fact is, anybody who can cut through left tackle like he used to, you gotta have an aggressive demon. And he was the minority who made good. He was making too much of an effort all the time, being a salesman for Hertz. And that NBC is the worst, I mean those guys are so fake. If you do that your whole ife, eventually your demon is going to come out. If you don’t let it out on a regular, healthy basis -- you gotta blow some steam. O.J. was too nice all the time. So one night he blows. You can’t repress it.”

Jules Feiffer: “One of the things that has always provoked my interest is that all the women I’ve known have this problem of low self-esteem, which men don’t have nearly as much, if at all. Some of the most poorly equipped men I know have never had a moment’s doubt in regard to their abilities, while some of the most talented women I’ve known will recoil if you praise them and will deny that they’re good. It’s something that I’ve never really understood. ¶ I’m not sure how connected to depression this is, although it may well be. It’s a field that deserves a lot more study that it’s been given. Most of the women I know are smart, intelligent, and in many cases a hell of a lot more interesting to be with than the men I know. And none of them are as certain of themselves in what they do as the men, even when they are infinitely more talented and brighter.”

Bill Stott: My motto used to be “There is always something more to do.” Now my motto is “There is always something more to notice.”

Paul Valery: “God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.”

Jesus, in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

Jung: “In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embrace that, life is wasted.”

From Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, 1994: The neo-Darwinists believe that we humans, like all animals, choose behaviors “that get our genes into the next generation. . . . It is the behavioral goals -- status, sex, effective coalition, parental investment, and so on -- that remain steadfast while our view of reality adjusts to accommodate this constancy. What is in our gene’s interests is what seems ‘right’ -- morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order.
“In short: if Freud stressed people’s difficulty in seeing the truth about themselves, the new Darwinians stress the difficulty of seeing the truth, period. Indeed, Darwinism comes close to calling into question the very meaning of the word truth. For the social discourses that supposedly lead to truth -- moral discourse, political discourse, even, sometimes, academic discourse -- are, by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles. A winner will emerge, but there’s often no reason to expect that winner to be truth. A cynicism deeper than Freudian cynicism may have once seemed hard to imagine, but here it is.
“This Darwinian brand of cynicism doesn’t exactly fill a gaping cultural void. Already, various avant-garde academics -- ‘deconstructionist’ literary theorists and anthropologists, adherents of ‘critical legal studies’ -- are viewing human communication as ‘discourses of power.’ Already many people believe what the new Darwinism underscores: that in human affairs, all (or at least much) is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image. And already this belief helps nourish a central strand of the postmodern condition: a powerful inability to take things seriously. . . .
“Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn’t -- not because it’s optimistic, but because it can’t take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is absurdism. . . . There’s no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show. . . . The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke.”

James Carroll, NYTBR, “In What I Lived For, Joyce Carol Oates has written a vivid and continuous nightmare: a savage dissection of our national myths of manhood and success, a bitter portrait of our futile effort to flee the weight of the past, a cold-eyed look at our loss of community and family, a shriek at the monsters men and women have become to each other and a revelation of our desolate inner lives. What I Lived For is an American Inferno.”

Clifford Geertz: “The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

Donna Boguslav, a registered nurse who specializes in eating disorders (nyt, 2/7/96): “If your self-esteem depends on your parents, peers or anyone but yourself, you’re in trouble. You’re vulnerable if your identity is defined through someone else’s eyes. Your sense of self-worth must come from within and not rely upon external appearances.”

David Grossman, Israeli writer: “When we start to recover from childhood, we are already on the edge of death. Life is so condensed: the crises of adolescence, living with someone, having your parents die. These are such profound traumas, and to document just one of them you need a whole lifetime.”

Mark Twain: “Always tell the truth. It will gratify some and astonish the rest.”

Fats Waller: “Find out what the woman wants, and give it to her just that way.”

Jesus, in Luke, in (I suspect) a recent translation: “Love what is before you. Do not discriminate.”

Milan Kundera: “Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.”

Anne Deveare Smith (nyt 2/1/97), as southern preacher: “‘Gawd . . . Gawd can heal you in an instant of a minute.’ There is a moment when most people can talk and they say something that nobody else can say. They didn’t hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and it’s gorgeous.”

Anonymous: "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not jealous. It does not put on airs. It is not snobbish. Love does nothing rude. It is not self-seeking; it is not prone to anger; it does not brood over injuries, but rejoices along with the truth. . . . Love never fails."

William Blake: "It is not that angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God alone."

Sister Wendy Beckett: “If you talk to people, you want them to understand you. You don’t have to use long words and tie your sentences up. I hope people will say, ‘That’s a wonderful picture, but I don’t agree with what she’s saying. This is what I think.’ That is what I want, everyone realizing they can look at a picture and have their own views.”

The minister-writer Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets, 1991: “I not only have my secrets. I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. . . . Our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.” Telling a secret “makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.”

Drew Pinsky (“Dr. Drew” on MTV’s Loveline): “You’re only as sick as your secrets, the saying goes, and you’re only as healthy as you can be honest. And if you’re not honest in your relationship, you’re not in a relationship.”

J. Anthony Lukas: "All writers, I think, are to one extent or another damaged. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves." [Committed suicide.]

Bertrand Russell: “In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.”

Don Hewitt: “The secret of 60 Minutes is so simple I can’t believe that the formula hasn’t been followed by others. It’s four words that every kid knows: ‘Tell me a story.’ I look at things in screening rooms and I say, ‘That’s an interesting guy and those are some great scenes you’ve got, but what’s the story?’ . . . The other secret to 60 Minutes is another four words: ‘I didn’t know that.’ Don’t tell me about acid rain; tell me about somebody whose life was ruined by acid rain.”

"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful heart will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away."

Samuel Johnson, asked what the greatest pleasure in life is: “Fucking. And the second is drinking. Therefore I wonder why there are not more drunkards, for all can drink, though not all can fuck.”

Henry Scott Holland: “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

Franz Kafka: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and detached. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Quentin Crisp, British homosexual who, at 72, moved to NYC, loved Americans, he said, for "their belief that personality is the greatest power on earth."

Samuel Johnson: “I found your essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.”

St. Augustine: “Everyone becomes what he loves. Do you love the earth? You will be earth. Do you love God? Then, I say, you will be God.”

Elias Canetti: "One must visit the dead and localize them; otherwise they slip away with astonishing speed. As soon as you join them in their proper place, they return to life. In a flash, you remember everything you thought you had forgotten about them, you hear their words, stroke their hair and see your reflection in the brightness of their gaze. Once upon a time you might never have been quite sure of the colour of their eyes; now you recognize it immediately. Perhaps everything in them is more intense than when they were alive; perhaps the dead await complete self-fulfillment in the resurrection that one of those they have left behind will offer them."

Penelope Fitzgerald (1998): "I have remained true to my deepest convictions. I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"

Emily Dickinson: "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

Reinhold Niebuhr: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.”

George Eliot: "It is never too late to be what you might have been."

Oliver Cromwell in 1650 to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland: ''I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.''

A friend: “The things that bore me are whatever I’m not doing.”

Sydney Gaines (age seven): "Dad, real friends are frontstabbers."

John (3:13): “No man hath ascended up to heaven, but that he came down from heaven.”

Don Quixote: “Knights errant have to know everything, so, eh, trust my judgment.”

Chuang Tzu: "The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It regrets nothing. It receives but does not keep."

Virginia Woolf said she liberated herself by having a "room of her own," but couldn't liberate her writing imagination. She speaks of the problem as though all women artists face it. Writing freely, as though in a dream, "her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, and depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers--they are impeded by the extreme conventionally of the other sex. For thought men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women."

Janet Malcolm, NYer, 2/ 21 & 28 /2000: "Chekhov’s privacy is safe from the biographer’s attempts upon it--as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letter and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity and death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography."

Newton Arvin, on Emerson (written in the late 1950s or early 1960s): "How can he be read with respect, or perhaps at all, in a time when we all seem agreed that anguish, inquietude, the experience of guilt, and the knowledge of the Abyss are the essential substance of which admissible literature is made?"

Philo of Alexandria: "Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

Alan Watts: "The purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. . . . [T]he purposeless life misses nothing . . . for it is only when there is no goal . . . that the human senses are fully open to receive the world."

Louis Kahn: “The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.”

Soprano Renee Fleming (NYer 11/12/01): "I was so much the good girl that I didn’t know what I wanted to have for lunch. I only knew what I should have for lunch."

Gwyneth Paltrow (Talk, Dec 2001): "It never ceases to amaze me how difficult life is. How it is just endless suffering, even when something of the magnitude of September 11 doesn’t occur. People are just always suffering in the own lives—unhappy and discontent and sad and lonely. Life is just such a struggle."

Lee Siegel, Harper’s (10/2001) review of Louis Menand, THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB. "Holmes is no comfort here: ‘If the will of the majority is unmistakable, and the majority is strong enough to have a clear power to enforce its will, and intends to do so, the courts must yield.’ The jobbist’s ideal of doing your duty and ‘touching the superlative’ is a stirring one. But what if your duty is to kill innocent people, and your superlative lies in killing them as efficiently and clandestinely as possible? When does, in Menand’s admiring words, Holmes’s ‘belief that nobility of character consists in doing one’s job with indifference to ends’ become the by-now proverbial brutality of simply ‘following orders’?"

Woody Guthrie: "Let me be remembered as the man who told you something you already knew.”

Edwin Shneidman: “Suffering is half pain and half being alone with that pain.” [My hunch: Suffering separates us; joy joins. That is the difference between tragedy and comedy.]

When asked life’s greatest pleasures, Samuel Johnson said, “Drinking and fucking. Therefore I wonder that more are not drunkards, since all can drink though not all can fuck.”

Carl Van Doren, of Sinclair Lewis: “What Red doesn’t realize is that in order to have friends, one must be willing to suffer a little boredom, and Red has never learned that, and he has almost no friends left.”

MARCEL PROUST: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Unnamed woman, on hearing the NYC Metropolitan Opera’s “Moses und Aron” by Schoenberg (NYer, 2/18 & 25/02): “I survived Auschwitz--I don’t have to sit through this.”

Virginia Woolf, contrasting the English and American peoples: "While we have shadows that stalk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them. That is what makes them the most interesting people in the world--they face the future, not the past."

Adam Gopnik, NYer, April 1, 2002: “We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament. Rousseau wrote of the feelings of the heart and the beauties of nature while stewing and seething in a little room. Dr. Johnson pleaded for Christian stoicism in desperate fear of damnation. The masters of the wry middle style, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, were mired in sadness and confusion. The angry and competitive man [James Thurber] writes tender and rueful humor because his own condition is what he seeks to escape. The apostles of calm reason are hypersensitive and neurotic; William James arrived at a pose of genial universal cheerfulness in the face of constant panic. Art critics are often visually insensitive--look at their living rooms!--and literary critics are often slow and puzzled readers, searching for the meaning, and cooks are seldom trenchermen, being more fascinated by recipes than greedy for food.”

Franz Kafka, 1/27/1904 letter to Oskar Pollak: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Emerson, Nature, chapter 1: “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. . . . I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes)—which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Philip Roth, The Dying Animal [father to son who has gotten a girl pregnant and now thinks he must marry her]: “I reminded him that nobody could make him do what he didn’t want to do. I said what I wish some forceful man had said to me when I was on the brink of making my mistake [and marrying his mother]; I said, ‘Living in a country like ours whose key documents are all about emancipation, all directed at guaranteeing individual liberty, living in a free system that is basically indifferent to how you behave so long as the behavior is lawful, the misery that comes your way is most likely to be self-generated.’”

Debra Winger, answering the question “what would you say if your daughter told you she wanted to be an actress”: “I would ask myself where did I go wrong.”

Last month, a survey was conducted by U.N. worldwide. The only question asked was “Would you please give your most honest opinion about a solution to the food shortage in the rest of the world?"
The survey was a HUGE failure. In Africa they did not know what "food" meant. In Western Europe they did not know what "shortage" meant. In Eastern Europe they did not know what "opinion" meant. In the Middle East they did not know what "solution" meant. In South America they did not know what "please" meant. In Asia they did not know what "honest" meant. And in the USA they did not know what "the rest of world " meant.

Yelena V. Kozlova, whose daughter, Darya, a ninth grader, died in a plane crash over Germany (July 2002) in which 45 Russian children, mostly high school honor students, died on their way to a vacation in Spain, speaking to her daughter’s grieving schoolmates: "Dig into life and be joyful."

Bill Stott: “i think i've always had the feeling that i was living among gods--which is to say among people who represented nearly all the potentials we humans have--and that, if i could simply recount, perhaps with a light dusting of analysis--what the people i knew did and said and felt, i'd have written something valuable.

John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul: "What else is it we are seeking from women...? What is that ache we are trying to assuage with her? Mercy, comfort, beauty, ecstasy.--in a word, God. I'm serious. What we are looking for is God.. . . We do not know how long it lasted, but there was a moment in Eden when Eve was fallen and Adam was not; she had eaten but he yet had a choice. I believe something took place in his heart that went like this: I have lost my... soul mate, the most vital companion I've known.... I know I cannot live without her.
“Adam chose Eve over God. If you think I exaggerate, simply look around.... Watch the powerful obsession at work. What else can this be but 'worship? Men come into the world without the God who was our deepest joy, our ecstasy. Aching for what we know not what, we meet [a woman] and we are history. She is the closest thing we've ever encountered to God, the pinnacle of creation, the very embodiment of God's beauty and mystery and tenderness and allure. And what goes out to her [is]...our longing for God."

Barbara Cook, NYT, 8/15/2002. To the last pupil, Wendy Lane Bailey, who sang "Time After Time" with a bouncy pop intonation that slid up to notes instead of attacking them squarely, Ms. Cook said, "I'm sure people tell you all the time that you're real good, because you are." But she added, "I'd like to see you take more chances." In the end, Ms. Cook suggested, that is the big paradox, and perhaps the big secret. "To be as authentic as we know how to be at the moment, so that we can be more and more present in what we do. The more we can do that, the safer we are. The problem is it feels most dangerous, because what I ask people to do is in effect undress emotionally, so that's very frightening and new. But this very thing that seems most dangerous is where safety lies."

Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán (NYT 10/3/02): "A documentary can play a role in the preservation of memory. A country without documentary films is like a family without a photo album. When you see the photo, you remember your past, but the same photo also redefines your past. So there is a to and fro with memory. You return to a forgotten story, and in the process you rewrite that story."

Economist Vilfredo Pareto: “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.”

Paul Schrader: "The secret to the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment."

Bill Stott: “Being with a grandchild one feels much closer to one's childhood self than one did with one's children. I suppose because as a parent one was struggling to escape one’s child self, be ‘adult’ and in control.”

Harold Bloom: “Individualism, whatever damages its American ruggedness continues to inflict on our politics and social economy, is more than ever the only hope for our imaginative lives. “

Herbert Butterfield, religious toleration was "the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer."

Woody Allen (NYT 11/11/2002): "I regret that my muse was a comic muse and not a dramatic muse. I would rather have had the gifts of Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams than the gifts I got. I'm not kvetching. I'm glad I got any gifts at all. But I would like to do something great. I feel I had grandiose plans for myself when I started. And I have not lived up to them. I've done some things that are perfectly nice. But I had a much grander conception of where I should wind up in the artistic firmament. What has made it doubly poignant for me is that I was never denied the opportunity. The only thing standing between me and greatness is me."

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842): “To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; in a word to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common, this is to be my symphony.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi: "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

Pittman McGehee, Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst: "What I've found is that for most of us, the first half of our lives is biography. We unconsciously wrap ourselves around our family histories. The second half of our life has the potential to be autobiography, provided we take responsibility for our own choices." (TX MONTHLY, Jan 2003, p. 87, in Jan Jarboe Russell’s “Jung at Heart.”)

Robert E. Lee (after the carnage of Fredericksburg): “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”

Pat Moynihan (when he learned J.F.K. was dead): "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually."

Gordon Stott: “Life makes a lot of ugliness. We need to make a lot of beauty to make up for this fact.”

Last two paragraphs of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:
“Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent his squad to the settlement; he’d swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that big of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned a favor from Tsezar that evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fall ill. He’d got over it.
“A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.”

Michael Kinsley, of George W. Bush: “He has the unreflective person’s immunity from irony, that great killer of intellectual passion. Ask him to reconcile his line on Iraq with his line on North Korea and he just gets irritated.”

U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., ambassador to Turkey during the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915, to Talaat Pasha, the Turkish interior minister who was leading the genocide and who didn't see why Morgenthau, a Jew and an American, was concerned about the death of Armenians, who were Christian and Turkish citizens: "I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion but merely as a human being." [Samantha Power, "A PROBLEM FROM HELL": AMERICA AND THE AGE OF GENOCIDE, p. 7.]

Jonathan Lahr: "We don't always read a memoir for historical truth. We read it to find out how the author escaped the bonds of family and became the hero of his or her own life."

Genghis Khan: “The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him—to ride their horses and take away their possessions!”

Marcel Proust: "Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."

Adam Nicholson, Daily Telegraph, 6/24/2003: "Henry is a simpler figure [than Hamlet, Lear, Othello, or MacBeth], whose drama is less spiritual and universal than political and social. His great question is not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘How should I behave?’ ‘What does a leader do?’"

Czeslaw Milosz, “Gift”:
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over
honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did
not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea
and sails.

Annie Sullivan: “I doubt if life or for that matter eternity is long enough to erase the terrors and ugly blots scored upon my mind during those dismal years from 8 to 14” spent in the poorhouse in Tewksbury, MA, among diseased prostitutes and the insane.

Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides, chapter 5: “I had lost nearly thirty-seven years to the image I carried of myself. I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents’ definition of me. They had defined my early on, coined me like a word they had translated on some mysterious hieroglyph, and I had spent my life coming to terms with that specious coinage. My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image of what they needed at the time.”

D.H. Lawrence, in a 1915 letter to Ottoline Morell: “At the bottom one knows the eternal things, and is glad.”

G.K. Chesterton, last lines of "The Rolling English Road”: "For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, / Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green."

Quote I read in July 2003: “Grieve not nor speak of me with tears, but laugh and speak of me as though I were beside you. I loved you so. It was heaven here with you.”

William Blake: “Everything Possible to be Believed is an Image of Truth.”

Elvis Mitchell, the New York Times (Aug. 6, 2003): "A foreigner judging the United States by its films would think Americans spend more time running from exploding fireballs than having sex."

Alan Ayckbourn claims that the age of the internet, e-mails and text messages is isolating people and that this makes theatre more important than ever: "I hope that theatre will always be with us. I think that it becomes more important, not less important, as we lose our sense of community because of the technology around us. Soon people will get married by text messages. We need spaces in every town in the country where we can discuss what it means to be human and to share ideas."

Christa Carvajal: “Art is dispensable because it's renewable."

Colin Rowe: "We depend on the world's broad indifference to our designs, its capacity for surprise, and its resistance to our touch for our very sanity. We can find the world inescapably meaningful and real precisely because of and not in spite of, its obstinacy."

Edmund Burke: "Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”

Joan Acocella (NYer 10/13/03): “The yearning for love is, in part, a desire to become visible as one really is to the Other, though every time one dares to let oneself be seen one risks being seen through.”

Joseph Conrad, in excellent fiction: "One may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world."

Talleyrand: “He who did not live in the years before the revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is.”

Melville: “Sailor or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for us all. Boys! beware of it: prepare for it in time. Greybeards! thank God it is passed.”

al-Qa'eda: "You're engaged in a war with people who love death as much as you love life."

A Russian politician (fall 2003): "We have to have someone to do the dirty job of keeping [the world] together. And that's the United States. And although you [Americans] do stupid things, the United States is the only steamboat we can hitch ourselves to and go in the direction of modernity."

Verna Hobson: “If there is an afterlife, won’t we be surprised!”

Billy Connolly: “The more you come into the daylight and tell the truth, the happier you become, the more your shadow goes away.” (New Yorker 11/17/03)

John Updike, “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”

Boswell: “Speaking of the inward light, to which some Methodists pretended, he said, it was a principle utterly incompatible with social or civil security. ‘If a man (said he,) pretends to a principle of action of which I can know nothing, nay, not so much as that he has it, but only that he pretends to it; how can I tell what that person may be prompted to do? When a person professes to be governed by a written ascertained law, I can then know where to find him.”

Samuel Johnson, when asked why people meet at table when generally there is not “one sentence of conversation worthy of being remembered”: “Why to eat and drink together, and to promote kindness; and, Sir, this is better done where there is no solid conversation: when there is, people differ in opinions and get into bad humour, or some of the company who are not capable of such conversation, are left out, and feel themselves uneasy. It was for this reason Sir Robert Walpole said, he always talked bawdy at his table, because in that all could join.”

Samuel Johnson: “All censure of a man’s self [i.e. all self-censure] is oblique praise. . . . It has all the invidiousness of self-praise,”

Spaulding Gray, in his 1980 Point Judith: “It’s very hard for me not to tell everybody everything.”

Kristian Wilson, Nintendo VP, 1989: "Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

Peter Ustinov: "Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit."

John McWorter, linguist: “When society values the impulsive spoken outburst over the reasoned elegance of the written word the implications for an informed citizenry are dire.”

Archie Hobson, of his sister and him after their parents’ deaths: “No one but us knows the things we know. After us, no one will know anything we haven't translated for them.”

Thoreau, diary, May 6, 1854: "All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love."

Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty Of All" (1877): “If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men.... What right have you, sir, Mr. Clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.”

John Waters: "There is no such thing as a bad movie if you go to a movie watching detail only. If you really hate the movie, just look at the lamps and pretend that the movie is about lamps. And then it can never be boring -- you can even see continuity mistakes within the lamps."

Melville: “That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.”

Melville: “Wherever we recognize the image of God let us reverence it; though it swing from the gallows.”

John Duckworth, after reading my article on heaven: “The longer I dwell on the subject the greater my desires of what I would want included. Really though another chance at my life without the fears and self-doubts that kept me from always believing in heaven on earth the first time. Well then too I would love to experience all of the past ages and finally I’d like to end up where all the dogs go so they could pet me all the time.”

Walter Kerr, Thirty Plays Hath November, p. 31: traditional plays such as Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes are too "beautifully sealed," with "no loose ends left lying about, no moral ambiguities. . . . In our new state of mind we distrust what is orderly because we are now sharply aware that in everything ordered there is something extremely arbitrary."

New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, 47 and the married father of two, announcing that he was gay and would soon resign his office (8/12/04): "At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is."

Dr. Sheenah Hankin, a psychotherapist in New York City: "The age of privacy is over and with it the ability to sustain denial."

Inversions of meaning, a la Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (“You came late! How nice”), an old love: “My sister and I love each other terribly.” “X suggests that we visit it, but it might be nice to see.” (Having cleaned a tub and drawn a bath for us two) “I’m waiting on you.”

Frederick A. Pottle, “Readable and Promising,” YALE DAILY NEWS, 12/8/1960, p. 2: “Among the poets, I shall venture no comment on Mr. Joseph Harned (‘From Songs of Mirth’) and Mr. Neil Goodwin (‘The Sky Passed in Lines’), because I don’t yet understand their poems. Mr. Bill Stott’s ‘Follow the Piper’ has a first stanza good enough for a major poet:
A bonfire claws the winter’s night
On Devil’s Moor, so wet and wide.
What phantoms reel in dark and light>
Old men are dancing, stand aside.
But the two following stanzas pretty much repeat the first and have not achieved the same transparent fusion of sense and form.”

Algernon Sidney Crapsey, The Last of the Heretics (1924): “When I am asked in these days what my religion is, I hesitate and stumble, and men go away thinking that I have no religion. But I have a religion and if asked to give it a name I should say I am a Pantheistic Humanist, and if one were to ask, ‘What is a Pantheistic Humanist?’ I should say one who believes in the divinity of a telegraph pole. . . . When I thought on these things I said if my Christ has in Him the divinity of a telegraph pole, then he is divine enough for me.” (pp. 292-93)

Adam Gopnik, NYer, 5/10/04, p. 90: “I once said something fatuous to him [his dying friend Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the MoMA] about enjoying tonight’s sunset, whatever tomorrow would bring, and he had replied that when you know you are dying you can’t simply ‘live in the moment.’ You loved a fine sunset because it slipped so easily into a history, yours and the world’s; part of the pleasure lay in knowing that it was one in a stream of sunsets you had loved, each good, some better, one or two perfect, moving forward in an open series. Once you knew that this one could be the last, it filled you with a sense of dread; what was the point of collecting painting in a museum you knew was doomed to burn down?”

Arthur Miller, NYT, 9/19/04: “It used to be that a play seemed to resonate into the society a lot more, and now it's simply one more entertainment. Maybe the competition has ground down moral and social meaning. Publicity and advertising are the major arts today. They shape the consciousness of the people far more than actual art does.”

Virginia Woolf: “Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Isaiah Berlin: “It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no skeptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.”

Germaine de Staël: “What man, exhausted by the passions of life, can listen with indifference to the tune which enlivened the dances and games of his tranquil infancy? What woman whose beauty time has at last ravaged can hear without tears the song that her lover once sang for her?”

Richard Avedon: “There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."

“I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the human mind! Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mind deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."

Izumi Shikibu, a 1000-year-old poem: “It is true the wind blows terribly here--but moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.”

Robert Byington, of me: “You have found the courage you've been seeking by loving indiscriminately.”

P.S. [a 2004 movie]: “Some guy broke your heart, and I get that—that’s traumatic. But that happens to everybody. It’s called . . . high school!”

THE NEW YORKER, Oct. 18, 2004: "John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix, . . . is also the co-author of a recent book, The Great Divide:Retro vs. Metro America, which suggests that the 2004 election is a contest between '"God, Family, and Flag' folk'--who live in the South, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and Appalachia--and forward-thinking metropolitans who support 'economic modernity,' 'religious moderation,' and 'excellence in education and science.'"

Goethe: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.”

E.B. White: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Karl Rove: "I run all my campaigns as if people were watching television with the sound turned down."

John Patrick Shanley, NYT 11/20/04: "Doubt has gotten a bad reputation. People who are utterly certain are vulnerable to a brand of foolishness that people who maintain a level of doubt are not."

Eric Frank Russell: "For years we have been making triumphant retreats in the face of a demoralized enemy advancing in utter disorder."

Dwight D. Eisenhower: "All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."

Nkosi Johnson, South African boy who died in 2001 of AIDS at age 12: "Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are." [Newsman Jim Wooten did a 2004 book on him.]

Ty Burr, in the Boston Globe, of a film called something like The Kranks’ Christmas: "It nails a curiously widespread contradiction in modern American pop culture - the desperate, self-negating need to be both cynical and sentimental at the same time.”

David Brooks, 12/14 (?) /04: “When Democrats open their mouths, they try to say something interesting. If the true thing is obvious and boring, the liberal person will go off and say something original, even if it is completely idiotic. This is how deconstructionism got started.”

Mark Twain: “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

Mark Twain: “I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.”

A.N. Scott, film review of Phantom of the Opera (NYT 12/23/04): “Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste--an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets.”

Mark Russell, off-Broadway theater producer who discovered or fostered the careers of Eric Bogosian, Karen Finley, Blue Man Group, John Leguizamo, Meredith Monk and Spalding Gray (NYT 1/22/05): "The key to a good theater moment is a certain transgression that opens it up. And that can be anything from Elevator Repair Service or someone taking off their clothes, or someone telling their own story without changing the names, like Spalding. These little fissures open us up into something new."

Reinhold Niebuhr: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary."

David Brooks, NYT column, February 26, 2005: “As Claus Christian Malzahn reminded us in Der Spiegel online this week, German politicians ridiculed Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech in 1987. They "couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany." But if there is one soft-power gift America does possess, it is this tendency to imagine new worlds. As Malzahn goes on to note, "In a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change.... We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow."

Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 3/4/05: “Writing in this space recently, I suggested that a world made too fast by computers and too harsh by 24-hour news more than anything needed its artists and architects to provide it with respite, rather than the emotional or visual pistol-whipping of too much recent art.”

Francine Prose, NYT (3/13/05 review of Jeannette Walls, “The Glass Castle”): “Memoirs are our modern fairy tales, the harrowing fables of the Brothers Grimm reimagined from the perspective of the plucky child who has, against all odds, evaded the fate of being chopped up, cooked and served to the family for dinner. What the memoir writer knows is what readers of Grimm intuit: the loving parent and the evil stepparent may in reality be the same person viewed at successive moments and in different lights. And so the autobiographer is faced with the daunting challenge of describing the narrow escape from being baked into gingerbread while at the same time attempting to understand, forgive and even love the witch.”

Elizabeth I: "Had I, my lords, been born crested not cloven, you had not treated me thus!"

Jean de la Bruyer: “Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.”

Wong Lon Sin See: "Every day you feel joy, happiness, and light in your heart is the Day of Enlightenment."

Jon Roberts: “When two or more are gathered in His name, He won’t be present.”

Peter Kramer, Against Depression: “Depression, the self as hollow shell.”

Zen quote: "Drinking my green tea, I stopped the war."

Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

George Orwell: “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

Emily Dickinson: “I like a look of agony, because I know it’s true.”

C.S. Lewis, last chapter "An Experiment in Criticism": “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissent in Abrams et al v. United States (1919): "When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

Robert Bly, 2/6/2003 letter to me: “Dear Bill, Thank you for trusting me with your book. I’ve found many good things in it, and I like the openness with which you talk about your own life. At the same time, I don’t think it’s concentrated enough to be a book. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but it’s as if you would need to distinguish more precisely what is new in your thought and commentaries from what others have done in a similar memoir. That’s a hard job, I know, and maybe a book of that thinner sort is not what you intend. Forgive me if I’m way off. With warm wishes.”

Mickey Owen, who passed the notorious passed ball in the 1941 World Series, maintained that he was not bothered by the barbs over his miscue. As he put it long afterward, "I would've been completely forgotten if I hadn't missed that pitch."

George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992: "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched."

Maude, in Harold and Maude: “L-I-V-E! LIVE! . . . Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room."

In January 1863 the great Italian-American soprano Adelina Patti gave an interview to Le Figaro that appears to have been one of the first conversational interviews in all journalism. Musical World and New York Musical Times ran a translation of the interview in its issue of January 17, 1863 (p. 43), after which it editorialized: “The . . . depicting the character of the great singer of the day through an ordinary conversation, well arranged, appears to us an immense improvement on the old-fashioned memoir. . . . In future, when this method has become generally known, ladies of celebrity, instead of being asked to sit for their portraits to photographers, will be asked to talk for their portraits to writers, and the great art will be to make them talk characteristically and well.” I found this reference in John Frederick Cone, Adelina Patti: Queen of Hearts, Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 1993, pp. 60-61. In addition to citing Musical World, Cone cites Herman Klein, The Reign of Patti, New York, Century, 1920, pp. 117-18.

John Kenneth Galbraith: “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.”

Robert Frost: “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

Brian Greene, professor of physics at Columbia, NYT 9/30/05: “In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos.

Joyce Carol Oates used the word “pathography” in the NYTBookReview in 1988; see NYTBR 7/10/05.

Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Glasgow Evening News: “There must, for instance, be something very strange in a man who, if left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on.”

Mayor Frank Hague, Jersey City, 1938: “You hear about constitutional rights, free speech, and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, ‘That man is a Red, that man is a Communist!’ You never hear a real American talk like that.”

Gordon Stott, of the money his grandparents gave him and his sister and cousins: “Sometimes that money, for all the ‘good’ it has done, reminds me of a liquor store on an Indian reservation. There was no good way to put it into the hands of us Indians.”

Skitch Henderson (AP obit, 11/2/2005): "I watch the public like a hawk. If I see boredom, I worry. You can tell by the applause: There's perfunctory applause, there's light applause, and then there's real applause. When it's right, applause sounds like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce."

Hunter S. Thompson, on meeting George W. Bush at Thompson’s Super Bowl party in Houston in 1974: "He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humor. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub, then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away."

Rev. Martin Niemöller, a German pastor imprisoned in World War II: "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

William Blake: “He who would do good must do it in minute particulars; general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.”

Kherry McKay: “Forgiveness gives its greatest gift to the forgiver.”

Cowboys defensive tackle La'Roi Glover, of his coach, Bill Parcells’ younger brother’s death (NYT 12/24/05): “Once we all found out what it was [what was troubling Parcells], we kind of understood and said, 'Hey, let's just focus in and do our jobs and try to take some of the pressure off.' "

Kurt Vonnegut, “In These Times,” March 2006: “When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
“Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
“I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
“Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: ‘Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.’ So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

P.G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money: “At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.”

Marshal Hermann Goring liked the quote “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun,” but the quote was coined by another German, Hanns Johst, in his play Schlageter, 1933.

Charles McGrath, reviewing Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, NYT 4/9/06: “His book is also preternaturally alert to what Bennett, in discussing his favorite paintings, calls ‘the glow,’ by which he means not just light but the small graceful touches, the odd details that catch the corner of the eye — the accidental vantage point, he says, that is also a shortcut to the back of the brain.”

Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), Protestant pastor and social activist: “When the Nazis arrested the Communists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist. When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Social Democrat. When they arrested the trade unionists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a trade unionist. When they arrested the Jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Jew. When they arrested me, there was no longer anyone who could protest.”

R. Buckminster Fuller: “Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.”

Stanley Kunitz, in his poem “The Long Boat”: “Peace! Peace! / To be rocked by the Infinite! / As if it didn't matter / which way was home; / as if he didn't know / he loved the earth so much / he wanted to stay forever.”

Robertson Davies: “Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”

Lincoln Steffens, to his protégée John Reed: “Each editor is to regard himself as the whole world. Whatever will interest him involuntarily (not as an editor, but as a human being) will interest the rest of us human beings. That’s S.S. McClure’s rule for his manuscript readers, and it is founded on sound psychology.”

Pablo Neruda, “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.”

Tom Robbins, according to Garrison Keiller, “says that when he starts a book, he has no idea of what the story will be. He never outlines and never revises. He just works on each sentence until he thinks it's perfect, sometimes for more than an hour, and then he moves on to the next one. He said, ‘I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.’”

Ernest Hemingway, when starting out in Paris, tried simply to write what he called "true sentences. . . . I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'" Between January and April 1922, Hemingway composed only six sentences he was proud of.

Edward Hopper: "Maybe I am slightly inhuman.... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

Seneca: “Death is the release from all pain and complete cessation, beyond which our suffering will not extend. It will return us to that condition of tranquility we had enjoyed before we were born. Should anyone mourn the deceased, then he must also mourn the unborn. Death is neither good nor evil, for good or evil can only be something that actually exists. However, what is of itself nothing and which transforms everything else into nothing will not at all be able to put us at the mercy of Fate.”

Kim Masters, Slate, 8/31/06: “Some in Hollywood argue that artists must be forgiven their excesses. Even after Roman Polanski went on the lam after he was charged with drugging and sodomizing a child, many in Hollywood's top ranks were prepared to welcome him back. And these are not simple questions. How many Gauguin canvases would you give up if the artist in exchange didn't abandon his wife and five children and knocked up fewer young girls in the Third World? What if you were responsible for chatting Gauguin up as you financed and promoted his disease-spreading adventures? Once you've got all that figured out, how do you think Mel Gibson stacks up as an artist against Gauguin, and what bargain would you make there?”

Ronald Reagan: “Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But the Marines don’t have that problem.”

Andre Dubus: “"We don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got."

Roger Kahn: "Writing from the heart and gut and succeeding makes life sweet."

Mother Teresa: “I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.”

Nicanor Parra: “The tree says ‘tree’ whenever its leaves move.”

Sally Vickers, Daily Telegraph, 8/13/06: “Linking ourselves to our losses is what makes them cease to be unspeakable.”

Jorge Luis Borges: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

David Brooks, “Nonconformity is Skin Deep,” NYT, 8/27/06: “middle-class types have been appropriating the symbols of marginalized outcasts since at least the 1830’s. This is no longer a way to express individuality; it’s a way to be part of the mob. Today, fashion trends may originate on Death Row, but it takes about a week and a half for baggy jeans, slut styles and tattoos to migrate from Death Row to Wal-Mart.
¶What you get is a culture of trompe l’oeil degeneracy. People adopt socially acceptable transgressions — like tattoos — to show they are edgy, but inside they are still middle class. You run into these candy-cane grunge types: people with piercings and inkings all over their bodies who look like Sid Vicious but talk like Barry Manilow. They’ve got the alienated look — just not the anger.
¶And that’s the most delightful thing about the whole tattoo fad. A cadre of fashion-forward types thought they were doing something to separate themselves from the vanilla middle classes but are now discovering that the signs etched into their skins are absolutely mainstream. They are at the beach looking across the acres of similar markings and learning there is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk-free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture.
¶Another generation of hipsters, laid low by the ironies of consumerism.”

Faust’s bargain with the Devil: "When to the moment I shall say,/ ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’/ Then mayst thou fetter me straightway/ Then to the abyss will I depart!"

William James, “A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.”

Jean Paul Richter: “God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald: "What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."

T.S. Eliot: "This last part of my life is the best, in excess of anything I could have deserved."

Winston Churchill: "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. . . . A modest little person, with much to be modest about."

Moses Hadas: "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."

Groucho Marx: "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."

Mark Twain: "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."

Oscar Wilde: "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."

Samuel Johnson: "He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."

Walter Kerr: "He had delusions of adequacy."

Robert Redford: "He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."

James Reston, about Richard Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them."

Count Talleyrand: "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."

Andrew Lang (1844-1912): "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination."

John Hodgman (comedian, Yale 1994), of Harold Bloom's teaching style: "Floridly affectionate while totally dismissive."

David Brooks (NYT book review 10/22/06): “Oakeshott was wise, but Oakeshottian conservatism can never prevail in America because the United States was not founded on the basis of custom, but by the assertion of a universal truth - that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain rights. The United States is a creedal nation, and almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed. In many cases, the people making those calls were religious leaders. From Jonathan Edwards to the abolitionists to the civil rights leaders to the people fighting AIDS and genocide in Africa today, religiously motivated people have been active in public life. They have been, in their certainty and their willingness to apply divine truths, fundamentalists - if we want to use Sullivan's categories. You take those people out of American politics and you don't have a country left.”

John Keats: "Nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel."

Will Blythe, review of Ralph Steadman’s Bruised Memories: Gonzo [which Steadman defines as “controlled madness”], Hunter S. Thompson, and Me, NYT, 11/19/06: “For a few years in the 1970s, it did appear that insanity was a great career move, that a deranged journalist might fruitfully subvert tired conventions that kept a writer from injecting himself into his work.

Poet Sharon Olds, who published her first book of poetry at 37: "I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky."

Joe DiMaggio: "You start chasing a ball and your brain immediately commands your body to 'run forward, bend, scoop up the ball, peg it to the infield,' then your body says, 'Who me?'"

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327): “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘Thank You,’ that would suffice.”

Woody Allen: “My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.”

Groucho Marx: "Horatio Alger's books conveyed a powerful message to me and many of my young friends—that if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come. As a child I didn't regard it as a myth, and as an old man I think of it as the story of my life."

David Brooks (NYT 1/14/07): “In his American Exceptionalism (1996), [Seymour Martin] Lipset pointed out that 78 percent of Americans endorse the view that ‘the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business.’ Fewer than a third of all Americans believe the state has a responsibility to reduce income disparities, compared with 82 percent of Italians. Over 70 percent of Americans believe ‘individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves’ whereas most Japanese believe ‘the state should take more responsibility to ensure everyone is provided for.’”

Michel de Montaigne: "The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness."

Dennis Dutton, aesthetician, NYT 2/27/06: “Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense. If you think an interpretation is by a 74-year-old pianist at the end of her life, it won’t sound quite the same to you as if you think it’s by a 24-year-old piano-competition winner who is just starting out. Beyond all the pretty notes, we want creative engagement and communication from music, we want music to be a bridge to another personality. Otherwise, we might as well feed Chopin scores into a computer.”

Emerson: “I am always insincere, as knowing that there are other moods.”

Charles Feidelson, Jr.: "Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns."

Kathryn Harrison: "We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are."

Kris Kristofferson: “The desire to be fucked up probably leaves you, but the desire to be high never does.”

Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia, spiritual leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Islamic organization of some 40 million members (WSJ April 7, 2007): "’Young people like to kiss each other,’ he says, throwing his hands in the air. ‘Why not? Just because old people don't do it doesn't mean it's wrong.’"

Abdul Munir Mulkhan, Indonesian Muslim moderate (WSJ 4/10/07): “Islam is not just for the Muslims. There are many teachings in Islam that are very beautiful but they are being covered over by this black-and-white way of thinking. For instance, there is a hadith [teaching] that says that smiling at other people is a form of charity.”

Malcolm Muggeridge: “When mortal men try to live without God, they infallibly succumb to megalomania or erotomania or both. The raised fist or the raised phallus; Nietzsche or D. H. Lawrence.”

Simone Weil: “One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God ... one is worshiping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.”

Kurt Vonnegut: “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”

Julius Erving: “Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

Dorothy Parker, on Aimee Semple McPherson’s 1928 autobiography: "It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario."

Chilean poet Raul Zurita, who has Parkinson’s, asked if he fears death: “What happens is that when I write, life hangs in suspension. Seriously. If you’re screwed because they kicked your son out of school for your not paying tuition, you can’t write. If you write, it’s because you kept that out of your head. And if life hangs in suspension, so does death. In that instant that you write, it’s the same instant that it was for Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Neruda, Parra, and Maquieria, your own contemporary. This is the fundamental simultaneity of all writing, where death is totally suspended.”

L. P. Hartley, first sentence of The Go-Between (1953): "The past is a foreign country—they do things differently there."

Anthony Lane, Review of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At the World's End," NYer, June 4, 2007: "At the climax, two vessels get their rigging entwined on the rim of a whirlpool, which sounds impressive, but give me a hot bath, an open plughole, and a pair of rubber ducks and I could have laid out the situation more efficiently."

Norman Mailer, NYer, 5/21/07: “If you’re writing a novel, you try to keep the navigator going. If it veers off course, you’re in trouble. . . . On a given day, if you take the wrong turn you can lose six moths. You try to steer it out of instinct.”

Woody Allen, “Getting Even”; a man asks his uncle: “Could it not be simply that we are alone and aimless, doomed to wander in an indifferent universe, with no hope of salvation, nor any prospect except misery, death, and the empty reality of eternal nothing?” The uncle replies, “You wonder why you’re not invited to more parties.”

David Brooks, 7/10/07: “When Americans face something that’s psychologically traumatic, they invent an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero who can deal with it. The closing of the frontier brought us the hard-drinking cowboy loner. Urbanization brought us the hard-drinking detective loner.”

Charles Krauthammer, 8/17/07: “Ronald Reagan, I was once told, said he liked The Natural except that he didn't understand why the Dark Lady shoots Roy Hobbs. Reagan, the preternatural optimist, may have had difficulty fathoming tragedy, but no one knows why Hobbs is shot. It is fate, destiny, nemesis. Perhaps the dawning of knowledge, the coming of sin. Or more prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether--and how--we ever come back.”

Chilean sex-talk radio host Roberto Artiagoitía (a.k.a. “El Rumpy”): "Women are going to fuck whoever they want, and men are going to fuck whoever they can."