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"No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead."
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"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."
"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."
"Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently."
"Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work."
"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."
"To 'live' is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived."
"Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs."
"The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure."
"I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think."
Explore more quotes by Van Wyck Brooks
"People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding."
"Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere."
"It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans."
"The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible."
"If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?"
"There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few."
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