top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Writer
"Wherever on this planet ideals of personal freedom and dignity apply, there you will find the cultural inheritance of England."
58
"A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."
58
"Down to Gehenna or up to the throne He travels the fastest who travels alone."
58
"Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about "let's see" and "try". If there's no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated."
58
"Secret to what?""Secret to shutting you up," he said. "I just have to beat you till you're half-dead, then give you chicken soup and"--he raised his hands--"blessed silence."
58
"Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage."
58
"What was it St. Augustine said? "The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance."
58
"A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists.Don't let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song."
58
"The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."
58
"I am now in Gibraltar. It is a large place and there does not seem to be room in this letter, in which to express my feelings about Moors in bare legs and six thousand Red-coats and to hear Englishmen speak again."
58
"Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good."
58
"Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him."
58
"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world."
58
"I've read your summary.""And?""It's not incompetent."Be still, my heart, so I don't faint from such faint phrase. "Did you expect it to be written in crayon?"
58
"Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you're ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don't need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and he's as happy as a worm in an apple - asleep."
58
"A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."
58
"The stage of Creation is a Timeless Marche. The three measures of Nothing, Possibility, and Chaos will eternally ensure that the script continues on."
58
"I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."
58
"As a rule from what I've observed the American Captain of Industry doesn't do anything out of business hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a Captain of Industry again."
58
"You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."
58
"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
58
"I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards."
58
"The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form."
58
"Take any emotion-love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions-if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them-you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. "But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment'."
58
"Man alone measures time.Man alone chimes the hour.And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures.A fear of time running out."
58
"The language of marriage is often a language of ownership, not a language of partnership."
58
"I could have had class. I could have been a contender."
58
"Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?""I guess it depends on how you die."
58
"There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his."
58
"The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition."
58
bottom of page