Malouf

“But the war for me had a private and more sinister dimension. Though I knew with one half of me that it belonged to the world of daylight reality, the world of newspaper headlines and apocalyptic announcements from the bottom of the stairs, I also knew, in some other part of my being, that this was only half the truth; there was more to the war than the wavering voices told us, more even than my Aunt Vera knew. When I crawled into bed at night and my father came to put out the light the war took on its real form. Giant staghorns leapt through the papered glare of my bedroom window, and our fernery beyond, with its mossy fish-pond and slatted frames hung with baskets of hare’s foot and maidenhair, sprang up in a shadow around me, an insubstantial jungle there was no way through. I choked Hitler and Mussolini, those historical bogeymen that even adults believed in, burst in upon me bearing their terrible paraphernalia of barbed wire, bayonets, tin helmets, hand grenades; their purpose now having nothing to do with the wall-map and its pins in our spare room, but being, quite simply, to reach up over the foot of my bed or down over the pillow and drag me into the pallid, black-and-white world of newspaper photographs and newsreels—a world without color, like the night itself, in which everyone was a victim, pale, luminous, with flesh already frazzled round the edge, and where being a child with curly hair and apple cheeks that everyone wondered at was no protection at all. The war wasn’t one of those activities that were strictly for grown-ups. The newsreels were full of children no older than myself climbing up gangplanks or being herded into trains. And how else did they get into the war (I couldn’t imagine their parents allowing them to go) unless they had been dragged there, over the pillow and down into the furballed, spider-crawling darkness under their beds?”


June 13, 2000

Baum

“Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For, aside from my evident inability to do anything “great,” I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one’s heart and brings its own reward.”
Frank Baum
August 17, 2000

Fitzgerald

“At any rate, let us love for awhile, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz”
August 16, 2000

Buchan

“I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”


August 15, 2000

Friedman

“People may surprise you with unexpected kindness. Dogs have a depth of loyalty that often we seem unworthy of. But the love of a cat is a blessing, a privilege in this world.”
Kinky Friedman
July 30, 2000

Morris

“In similar context, I was spending some time in Virginia with the writer Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., whom I had known for more than thirty years and who had always seemed level-headed enough to me. Ed had a Siamese cat he considered to be directly descended from the royal cays in the nineteenth-century court of King Mongkut of Siam. As with James Jones’s stuck-up Parisian cat, this one would vault onto Yoder’s shoulder and then drape himself, in the manner of a fox fur, around his neck. I thought this degrading. This can’t name was Pharaoh, and he communicated with Yoder in low, emphatic, guttered syllables – just sat there in front of his patron and talked. I was actually witness one evening to the owner’s pitting a slice of cantaloupe on the creature’s dish, which he forthwith devoured, then turned to us and, I swear to God, said “Yum! Yum! Yum! Yum!” Yoder replied, “Yum! Yum! Yum! Yum!” right back; then the two of them began conversing in deep, throaty syllables reminiscent of the dialogue in the old B movie Invasion of the Cat Monsters, emphasizing these exchanges by histrionic movements of both their heads. Now, if you see a Pulitzer prize – winning editorialist whom you have known for Lord knows how long standing nostril to nostril with a garrulous cat and talking in the cat’s language, that cannot help but give you pause about the man, and for that matter the cat.”


July 30, 2000

Gass

“Every day, from the library, books are borrowed and taken away like tubs of chicken to be consumed, though many are also devoured on the premises, in the Reading Room, where traditionally the librarian, wearing her clichés, shushes an already silent multitude and glares at the offending air. Yet there, or in someone’s rented room, or even by a sunny pool—who can predict the places where the encounter will occur?—the discovery will be made. And a finger will find the place and mark it before the books’ covers come closed; or its reader will rise and bear her prize out of the library into the kitchen, back to her dorm room, or, along with flowers and candy, to a bedside, in a tote bag onto the beach; or perhaps a homeless scruffy, who has been huddling near a radiator, will leave the volume behind him when he finally goes, as if what his book said has no hold on his heart, because he cannot afford a card. Yet, like Columbus first espying land, each will have discovered what he or she cares about, will know at last what it is to love – a commonplace occurrence – for, in the library, such epiphanies, such enrichments of mind and changes of heart, are the stuff of every day.”
William H. Gass, “In Defense of the Book, On the enduring pleasures of paper, type, page and ink”
July 14, 2000

Sedaris

“Test eye shadow on all the rabbits you want. Strap electrodes to the skulls of rhesus moneys and shock them into a stupor, but it is inhuman to place a nudist on horseback the day after a chili cook-off. (Was he always an Appaloosa?)”


July 13, 2000

Sedaris

“In terms of emotional comfort, it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well-made cocktail.”


July 13, 2000

Sedaris

“My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you fro what you are and you’re likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven’t got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.”


July 13, 2000

Sedaris

“Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren’t foolish as much as they are kind.”


July 13, 2000

Gass

“Unlike the love we’ve made or meals we’ve eaten, books congregate to form a record around us of what they’ve fed our stomachs or our brains. These are not a hunter’s trophies but the living animals themselves.”
William H. Gass, “In Defense of the Book, On the enduring pleasures of paper, type, page and ink”
July 12, 2000

Gass

“We shall understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together through many adventures and a long time. Words on a screen have visual qualities, to be sure, and these darkly limn their shape, but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be gone. Off the screen they do not exist as words. They do not wait to be reseen, reread; they only wait to be remade, relit. I cannot carry them beneath a tree or onto a side porch; I cannot argue in their margins; I cannot enjoy the memory of my dismay when, perhaps after years, I return to my treasured copy of Treasure Island to find the jam I inadvertently smeared there still spotting a page precisely at the place where Billy Bones chases Black Dog out of the Admiral Benbow with a volley of oaths and where his cutlass misses its mark to notch the inn’s wide sign instead.”

William H. Gass, “In Defense of the Book, On the enduring pleasures of paper, type, page and ink”
July 12, 2000

Gass

“When Ben Johnson was a small boy, his tutor, William Camden, persuaded him of the virtue of keeping a commonplace book: pages where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especially pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed and that would, because they were written afresh in a new place, and in a context of favor, be better remembered, as if they were being set down at the same time in the memory of the mind. Here were more than turns of phrase that could brighten an otherwise gloomy page. Here were statements that seemed so directly truthful they might straighten a warped soul on seeing them again, inscribed, as they were, in a child’s wide round trusting hand, to be read and reread like the propositions of a primer, they were so bottomed and basic.”

William H. Gass, “In Defense of the Book, On the enduring pleasures of paper, type, page and ink”
July 11, 2000

Malouf

“Maybe in the end, even the lies we tell define us. And better, some of them, than our most earnest attempts at the truth.”


June 13, 2000

Ghosts of Mississippi

"When you hate, the only person who suffers is you; because most of the people you hate don't know and the others don't care."


June 6, 2000

Morris

"Southerners hate to be strangers to each other. That's why Atlanta is so traumatic for Southerners to visit. Southerners like to see you and say, "Hi, how are you?" And the Yankees in Atlanta just don't respond to that. As for the native Atlantans, there's a city they remember that no longer really exists. But the Delta! It's still here. I've never seen a place where people talk so much to each other, and not just whites and whites, blacks and blacks. Damned if the whites and blacks don't carry on a conversation all day long."


June 6, 2000

Morris

"The systematic organization necessary to get significant images of celluloid is vast. The perpetual waiting around on the set, the moods, the anxieties, the personalities, the ennui, the flippant and cynical Hollywood humor and extravagant one-liners provide their own histrionics. "Once a movie starts shooting," John Gregory Dunne has written, "it resembles a freight train without breaks; it gathers speed and goes, and it is best to keep out of the way... Tension is the given of a movie, and it has less to do with ego than with the intensity of short-term relationships, a life time lived in a seventy-day shoot.""


June 6, 2000

Morris

"The set was not only a communal phenomenon but also an acutely hierarchical one. Everyone had a fucntion, and the chain of command, even given the banter and boisterousness of frivolous moments, began at the top with the director, producers, and stars, moving on down through the entire assemblage to the most obscure grips and gaffers. The Hollywood phraseology could not be more specific: "Above the line" meant "talent"- directors, producers, actors, screenwriters; "Below the line" meant the technicians. This hierarchy was most tangible than any I had ever observed, even in Washington D.C., a caste town if ever there was one, and it dutifiully extended even to the specific dimensions of the private trailers always parked near the shooting area: forty feet in length, or thirty, or twenty, two-room or one-room, the director and the stars with the larger and best-appointed down to the actors of lesser stature with the more diminutive ones. A few dine privately in these air-conditioned trailers with kitchenette and bathroom and bedroom and television, while the members of the crew are outside, under a tent, serving themselves buffet. And everyone is eating well."


June 5, 2000

Morris

"The whole vicinity is a luminous burst of light- lights everywhere in the middle of the woods. To the side is a big rig, several vans and smaller trucks, a Lincoln Town Car for the star, Alec Baldwin, steel trunks filled with esoteric equipment, portable generators, a great welter of cable, nets, sandbags, grip stands, opaqhe boards, trucks loaded with ladders, tools, tripods, reflectors, ropes. Between the massive columns of the ruins a camera arches upward and dollies back. Paraphenalia dangles from the belts of these bustling people; many of them carry walkie talkies and wear headsets. Everyone seems to be rushing somewhere. Almost everyone has a stainless steel necklace with a laminated card attached. The cards display a blown-up Mississippi road map tinted red in the background with, The Mississippi Project Cast And Crew written across it. Muscular figures bearing tattoos shout, "Coming through! Watch your feet!" They are carrying boxes, two-by-fours, axes, sawes, crates, odd items of all descriptions. Many are wearing bandannas, which they often take off to wipe away the sweat. These, I learn, are the grips, the equivalent of stagehands, and they seem heedless to the filming itself, even to the anarchy they themselves are helping to create. They move forward to whatever destination with an almost rank and churlish resolve.

The sense of frantic motion is notable: what appears to be chaos, tension, and confusion interspersed with swift movements of utter stillness and quiet, then noise and movement again. For the maiden visitor, such as I, to an important Hollywood set, the mood appears enigmatic, almost demented. On this evening I feel like an intruder in an ant colony, the worker ants everywhere hurrying along, each with a task to do, the security men who enforce lockup being the guardian ants of the colony, protecting accesses to the heart of the compound, and in the middle of this ceaseless motion the monarch, stationary in front of the monitor, the center of attention, everyone scurrying around this personage desiring only to please: the director."


May 29, 2000

Morris

"There are not many prospects in America so beautiful as a field of white cotton in the early fall; and if you stand in the right spot in late afternoon in the Delta, you catch the golden glow of autumn's setting sun, the verdant green of the trees along the rivers, the bright red mechanical cotton pickers, the panoply of white in the undulating gloaming. It makes you feel big and important in such a moment-- at least those who never worked these fields-- to know that the ancient Egyptians grew this same cotton, and that it has been with us since hierogpyphics. There are not many American places where you can see so far, thirty miles away, it seems, under the copious sweep of the horizons. You can stand up there in Kansas or Nebraska and do that, but there is nothing to see except more of Kansas and Nebraska. Yet, in this glutinous and devouring soil cotton has forever pertained to blood and guilt, as it must have too with the Egyptians."


May 29, 2000

The Dalai Lama

"I think in many ways narrow-minded attitudes lead to extreme thinking. And this creates problems. For instance, Tibet was a Buddhist nation for many centuries. Naturally, that resulted in Tibetans feeling that Buddhism was the best religion, and a tendency to feel that it would be a good thing if all of humanity became Buddhist. The idea that everyone should be a Buddhist is quite extreme. And that kind of extreme thinking just causes problems. But now that we've left Tibet, we've had a chance to come into contact with other religious traditions and learn about them. This has resulted in coming closer to reality-- realizing that among humanity there are so many different mental dispositions. Even if we tried to make the whole world Buddhist it would be impractical. Through closer contact with other traditions you realize the positive things about them. Now, when confronted with another religion, initially a positive feeling, a comfortable feeling, will arise. We'll feel if that person finds a different tradition more suitable, more effective, then that's good! Then it's like going to a restaurant we can all sit down at one table and order different dishes according to one's taste. We might eat different dishes, but nobody argues about it."


May 27, 2000

The Dalai Lama

"So, let us reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our lives needs to be positive. We weren't born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be a value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities- warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful- happier."


May 27, 2000

The Dalai Lama

"We can also see that our emotional health is enhanced by feelings of affection. To understand this, we need only to reflect on how we feel when others show us warmth and affection. Or, observe how our own affectionate feelings or attitude automatically and naturally affect us from within, how they make us feel. These gentler emotions and the positive behaviors that go with them lead to a happier family and community life.

So, I think that we can infer that our fundamental human nature is one of gentleness. And if this is the case, then it makes all the more sense to try to live a way of life that is more in accordance with this basic gentle nature of our being...

Of course we can't ignore the fact that conflicts and tensions do exist, not only within an individual mind but also within the family, when we interact with other people, and at the soceital levels, the national level, and the global level. So, looking at this, some people conclude that human nature is basically aggressive. They may point to human history, suggesting that compared to other mammals', human behavior is much more aggressive. Or, they may claim, "Yes, compassion is a part of our mind. But anger is also a part of our mind. They are equally a part of our nature, both are more or less and the same level." Nonetheless... it is still my firm conviction that human nature is essentially compassionate, gentle. That is the predominate feature of human nature. Anger, violence, and aggression may certainly arise, but I think it's on a secondary or more superficial level, in a sense, they arise when we are frustrated in our efforts to achieve love and affection. They are not part of our most basic, underlying nature."


May 27, 2000

Dostoyevsky

"You know... photographs are only very rarely good likenesses, and one knows why. It's because the original, I mean each one of us, is only very rarely a good likeness of himself. Only at rare moments does a human face express its chief feature, its most characteristic idea. An artist can study a face and gauge its main idea, though at the moment he copies it, it might not be on the face at all."


May 26, 2000

Dostoyevsky

"Still, maybe it's better just to insult people. At least it eliminates the misfortune of loving them."


April 29, 2000

Dostoyevsky

"He's a very proud man, as yourself have just said, and many very proud people like to believe in God, particularly if they like to look down on other people. I think many strong people have a sort of natural compulsion to find someone or something to worship. A strong man often finds it very difficult to endure his own strength."


April 29, 2000

Styron

"If the Lord giveth, which I heard you say at a funeral not too long ago, and if the Lord taketh away, which I also heard you proclaim with such sturdy acceptance, is not the Lord accountable for what happens in the time between the giving and the taking?"


April 19, 2000

Cather

"Men travel faster now but I do not know if they go to better things."


April 17, 2000

Cather

"Setting is accident. Either a building is a part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger."


April 17, 2000

Cather

"The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still -- and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!"


April 17, 2000

Rushdie

"Who knows what makes people friends? Something in the way they move. The way they sing off-key."


March 13, 2000

Rushdie

"When Fate sends a gift, one receives good fortune."


March 10, 2000

Haden-Guest

"Note: Artists are frequently the least reliable persons to ask about the springs of their own work."


March 3, 2000

Judd

"Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its content were meant to be. Otherwise art is only show and monkey business."
Donald Judd
March 3, 2000

Schjeldahl

"There's a very understandable tendency to deny the new. It seems to me that when things are moving at their fastest, a certain melancholy, an ennui, is at its maximum. But people get over their depression and discover that the present moment has the unique property of being the only present moment. Things push forward, backward, sideways. They change."
Peter Schjeldahl
March 3, 2000

Naylor

"A person is made up of much more than the "now.""


February 22, 2000

Naylor

"Now I'm gonna tell you about cool. It comes with the cultural territory: the beating of the bush drum, the rocking of the slave ship, the rhythm of the hand going from cotton to sack to cotton row and back again. It went on to settle into the belly of the blues, the arms of Jackie Robinson, and the head of every ghetto kid who lives to a ripe old age. You can keep it, you can hide it, you can blow it-- but even when your ass is in the tightest crack, you must never, ever, LOSE it."


February 22, 2000

Naylor

"Nothing I had met in that world had prepared me for your possibility."


February 22, 2000

Naylor

"She begins to learn even at this age: there is more to be known behind what the eyes can see."


February 22, 2000

Naylor

"It only takes time for a man to grow older, but how many of them grow up?"


February 22, 2000

Pynchon

"Somewhere further along, she'd been given to understand, she would discover that all souls, human and otherwise, were different disguises of the same greater being-God at play."


December 22, 1999

Ondaatje

"John Robichaux! Playing his waltzes. And I hate to admit it but I enjoyed listening to the clear forms. Every note part of the large curve, so carefully patterned that for the first time I appreciated the possibilities of a mind moving ahead of the instruments in time and waiting with pleasure for them to catch up. I had never been aware of that mechanistic pleasure, that trust."


December 14, 1999

Ondaatje

"She grins. And there is my grin which is my loudest scream ever.

In the water like soft glass. We slide in slowly leaving our clothes by the large stone. Heads skimming along the surface.

As long as I don't hurt you or Jaelin. As long as I don't hurt you or Jaelin, she mimics. Then beginning to imitate the loons and swimming deeper, her head sliding away from me. Below our heads all the evil dark swimming creatures are waiting to brush us into nightmare into heart attack to suck us under into the darkness into the complications. Her loon laugh. The dull star of white water under each of us. Swimming towards the sound of madness."


December 14, 1999

Ondaatje

"The photographs of Billocq. HYDROCEPHALIC. 89 glass plates survive. Look at the pictures. Imagine the mis-shapen man who moved round the room, his grace as he swivelled round his tripod, the casual shot of the dresser that holds the photograph of the whore's baby that she gave away, the plaster Christ on the wall. Compare Christ's hands holding the metal spikes to the badly sewn appendix scar of the thirty year old naked woman he photographed when she returned to the room-- unaware that he had already photographed her baby and her dresser and her crucufix and her rug. She now offering grotesque poses for an extra dollar and Bellocq grim and quiet saying No, just stand there against the wall there that one no keep the petticoat on this time. One snap too quickly catching her scorning him and then waiting, waiting for minutes so she would become self-conscious towards him and the camera and her states, embarrassed at just her naked arms and neck and remembers for the first time in a long while the roads she imagined she could take as a child. And he photographed that.

What you see in his pictures is her mind jumping that far back to when she would dare to imagine the future, parading with love or money on a beautiful anonymous cloth arm. Remembering all that as she is photographed by the cripple who is hardly taller than his camera stand. Then he paid her, packed and she lost her grace. The picture is just a figure against a wall."


December 14, 1999

Ondaatje

"On his last night Webb went to hear Bolden play. Far back, by the door, he stood alone and listened for an hour. He watched him dive into the stories found in the barber shop, his whole plot of song covered with scandal and incident and change. The music was coarse and rough, immediate, dated in half an hour, was about bodies in the river, knives, lovepains, cockiness. Up there on stage he was showing all the possibilities in the middle of the story."


December 14, 1999

Danticat

"Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you, sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of."


December 6, 1999

Danticat

For some, passion is the gift of a ring in a church ceremony, the bearing of children as shared property. For me it was just a smile I couldn't help, tugging at the sides of my face."


December 6, 1999

Stephenson

"Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot."


October 30, 1999

Tan

Two years is enough time, I know, to layer memories of what was with what might have been. And that's fine, because I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptics rationale of relying on proof through fact."


October 18, 1999

Tan

"You can't stop young girls from wishing. No! Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming-- well, that's like saying you can never change your fate."


October 18, 1999

Tan

"Yet over these last seventeen years, I've come to know that the heart has a will of its own, no matter what you wish, no matter how often you pull out the roots of your worst fears."


October 18, 1999

Robbins

"Life is largely material, and there is no small heroism in the full and open enjoyment of material things. The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine."


August 30, 1999

Robbins

"Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as "important" only if it's sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your cheerful dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self indulgence."


August 30, 1999

Robbins

"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route."


August 29, 1999

Robbins

"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.
The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion."


Augist 29, 1999

Robbins

"Here they teach that much of existence amounts only to misery; that misery is caused by desire; thereofore, if desire is eliminated, then misery will be eliminated. Now, that is true enough, as far as it goes. There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person foreswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained? A life with neither misery nor pleasure is an empty, neutral existence, and, indeed, it is the nothingness of the void that is the lamas' final objective. To actively seek nothingness is worse than defeat; why, Kudra, it is surrender; craven, chickenhearted, dishonorable surrender. Poor little babies are so afraid of pain that they spurn the myriad sweet wonders of life so that they might protect themselves from hurt. How can you respect that sort of weakness, how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?"


August 29, 1999

Robbins

"The gods have a great sense of humor, don't they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inapporpriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous system like an onion, romantic dreamery will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an unedcuated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her culture and religion, heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought."


August 29, 1999

Morris

"Yet there is an electricity between white Southerners and Eastern Jews, for despite the most manifest disparities they have emerged from two similar cultures, buttressed by old traditions of anguish and the promise of justice. They sense this in each other; in the happiest of circumstances they exist to one another somewhat like parallel lines. They bemuse one another. For if the Jews are the carriers of culture, taking it with them wherever they go, from Warsaw to Scarsdale, the Southerners themselves are the oldest of the Americans, adventurers, dreamers of dreams, high-tempered and stubborn, playful even in the direst times, the classic founders of states and indeed of our nation."


August 17, 1999

Morris

"And I've learned that most Southerners go home sooner or later for good, even if it's in a coffin."


August 17, 1999

Rushdie

"Scientists get angry when laymen misunderstand, for example, the uncertainty principle. In an age of great uncertainties it is easy to mistake science for banality, to believe that Heisenberg is merely saying, gee, guys, we just can't be sure of anything. It's all so darn uncertain, but isn't that, like, beautiful? Whereas, actually he's telling us the exact opposite: that if you know what you're doing you can pin down exact quantum of uncertainty in any experiment, any process. To knowledge and mystery we can now ascribe percentage points. A principle of uncertainty is also a measure of certainty. It's not a lament about shifting sands but a gauge of the solidity of the ground.
By the same token, as we say in Hug-me, I get annoyed when people misunderstand change. We're not talking about the goddamn I Ching here. We're talking about the deepest stirrings of our essential natures, of our secret hearts. Metamorphosis isn't whimsy. It's revelation."


July 19, 1999

Rushdie

"The desire to debunk the extroidinary, the urge to chop off its feet until it fits within the confines of the acceptable, is sired by envy on inadequacy. Most of us, on arriving at the notorious inn of Polypemon Procrustes in Corydallus, Attica, would find the bed we were offered was far larger than ourselves. In the middle of the night he would seize us and stretch us screaming on the rack until we fit. Many of us who are racked by the knowledge of our smallness begrudge the few true heroes their great size."


July 19, 1999

Rushdie

"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you. I say join the goddamn dance. And let me say that if you don't the disappointment might kill me too, and if it does and there's light at the end of the famous tunnel maybe I'll come back and shine it in your eyes. If I have to haunt you into doing the right thing I'll find me a white sheet and howl."


July 14, 1999

Rushdie

"When a great tree falls in the forest, there's money to be made from the sale of firewood."


July 14, 1999

Rushdie

"If Ficino believed that our music is composed by our lives, the contemporary Czech Milan Kundera thinks, contrariwise, that our lives are composed like music. "Without realizing it the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty, even in times of the greatest distress." To stand the old principle of good design on its elegant head: in our functioning we follow the dictates of our need for form."


July 14, 1999

Rushdie

"We underestimate our fellow humans because we underestimate ourselves. They - we - are capable of being much more than we seem."


July 14, 1999

Kubrick

"You know, Michael, it's not absolutely true in every case that nobody likes a smart-ass."
Stanley Kubrick
July 10, 1999

Rushdie

"Everything must be made real, step by step, he tells himself. This is a mirage, a ghost world, which becomes real only beneath our magic touch, our loving footfall, our kiss. We have to imagine it into being, from the ground up."


July 9, 1999

Rushdie

"Suicide is a crime of violence against those who remain alive."


June 27, 1999

Rushdie

"Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is it!"


June 27, 1999

Rushdie

Impossible sroties, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives."


June 27, 1999

Rushdie

"The world is not cyclical, not eternal or immutable, but endlessly transforms itself, and never goes back, and we can assist in that transformation.
Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them, bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
Your songs are your planets. Live on them but make no home there. What you write about, you lose. What you sing, leaves you on the wings of song.
Sing against death. Command the wildness of the city.
Freedom to reject is the only freedom. Freedom to uphold is dangerous.
Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away."


June 7, 1999

Rushdie

"And yet - though I know that dead myths were once live religions, that Quetzalcoatl and Dionysius may be fairy tales now but people to say nothing of goats, once died for them in large numbers - I can still give no credence whatsoever to systems of belief. They seem flimsy, unpersuasive examples of the literary genre known as "unreliable narration." I think of faith as irony, which is perhaps why the only leaps of faith I'm capable of are those required by the creative imagination, by fictions that don't pretend to be fact, and so end up telling the truth. I am fond of saying that all religions have one thing in common, namely that their answers to the great question of our origins are all quite simply wrong."
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
June 7, 1999

Rushdie

"It's tough to speak of the beauty of the world when one has lost one's sight, an anguish to sing music's praises when your ear trumpet has failed. So also it is hard to write about love, even harder to write lovingly, when one has a broken heart. Which is no excuse; happens to everyone. One must simply overcome, always overcome. Pain and loss are "normal" too. Heartbreak is what there is."


June 2, 1999

Rushdie

"For a long while I have believed... that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as "natural" a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that; for those who value stability, who fear transcience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams, alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not aleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book."


June 2, 1999

Forsythe Hailey

"Whatever regrets I take with me to my grave, they will not include one at having left anything unsaid."


April 12, 1999

Forsythe Hailey

"I would like my epitaph to read "To be continued.""


April 12, 1999

Forsythe Hailey

"Sometimes I think the primary division in the world is not between male and female but between people who travel and people who stay home."


April 12, 1999

Forsythe Hailey

"California is indeed the Promised Land. In climate and scenery it surpasses anywhere I have ever been."


April 12, 1999

Forsythe Hailey

"Surely it is unwise to depend solely on a profession as fickle as film-making for one's livelihood."


April 12, 1999

Forsythe Hailey

"Though the Catholic ritual is as foreign to me as the tongue in which it is conducted, I could not help being moved by the devotion of the crowd and the reverence in which they hold "Il Papa." I envy the faith that allows them to submit so completely to the authority of a man who is only human in spite of his high position. There is something so touchingly childlike about the Catholic faith. We all long for an infallible father figure but finally come to realize out parents are no more perfect than we are."


April 12, 1999

I don't normally comment on these posts but this one deserves something. I find this passage to be incredibly condescending and wonder why I wrote it in this book. I hesistated to post it here but I do know that no one reads this. So there!

Robbins

"The natural enemy of the daughters is not the fathers and not the sons,... I was mistaken.
The enemy of women is not men. No, the enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of the capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the emeny of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men.
We all have the same enemy. The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.
There are authoritative blacks with dull minds, and they are the enemy. The leaders of capitalism and the leaders of communism are the same people, and they are the enemy. There are dull-minded women who try to repress the human spirit, and they are the enemy just as much as the dull-minded men.
The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized."


February 26, 1999

Robbins

"I take the universal and make it personal. The only truly magical and poetic exchanges that occur in this life occur between two people. Sometimes it doesn't get that far. Often, the true glory of existence is confined to individual consciousness. That's okay. Let us live for the beauty of our own reality."


February 26, 1999

Robbins

"The storm reminded Sissy of that creature that is simultaneously the most dangerous and pitiful thing on Earth: a scared old man with a title."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the Great Order of Love. How is this done? By fucking around with syntax. [Definitions are limiting. Limitations are deadening. To limit oneself is a kind of suicide. To limit another is a kind of murder.]"


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"You've heard of people calling sick. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well? It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, "Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore." Call in Well."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"I'll say this and no more: there's got to be poetry. And magic... Poetry and magic at every level. If civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deoderizer in the shithouse of existence, then statesmen are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry. Bankers are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry. Time magazine is going to have to write about magic and poetry. Factory workers and housewives are going to have to get their lives entangled in magic and poetry."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel repitious bore."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Of course love can never be stripped bare of illusion, but simply to arrive at an awareness of illusion is to hold hands with the truth - "


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Every time I tell you that I love, you flinch. But that's your problem."


Fenruary 24, 1999

Robbins

"I spend nearly as much time dreaming as I do thinking. Yet how many put their dreams to any kind of practical or enlightening application? Precious few, I'll tell you. Sleeping/dreaming may be what I do best. It may be my true vocation and the time I have to spend tending to survival just chore time; taking out the garbage, as it were."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Her hands on her hips, as in the statue of the Ill Tempered Red-Headed Scorpio Madonna."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Everybody has got to figure out experience for himself. I'm sorry. I realize that most people require externalized, objective symbols to hang on to. That's too bad. Because what they are looking for, whether they know it or not, is internalized and subjective. There are no group solutions! Each individual must work it out for himself. There are guides, all right, but even the wisest guides are blind in your section of the burrow. No, all a person can do in this life is to gather about him his integrity, his imagination and his individuality - and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Now "Nature" is a mighty huge word, one of those sponge words so soaked with meanings that you can squeeze out interpretations by the bucketful; and needless to say Nature on many levels is my darling, because Nature, on many levels is the darling. I was lucky enough to rediscover at a farily early age what most cultures have long forgotten; that every aster in the field has an identity just as strong as my own. Don't think that didn't change my life. But nature is not infallible. Nature makes mistakes. That's what evolution is all about: growth by trial and error. Nature can be stupid and cruel. Oh, my, how cruel! That's okay. There's nothing wrong with Nature being dumb and ugly because it is simultaneously -paradoxically - brilliant and superb. But to worship the natural is to practice Oraganic Fascism - which is what many of my pilgrims practice. And in the best tradition of fascism, they are totally intolerant of those who don't share their beliefs; thus, they foster the very kinds of antagonism and tension that lead to strife, which they, pacifists one and all, claim to abhor. To insist that a woman who paints berry juice on her lips is somehow superior to the woman who wears Revlon lipstick is sophistry; it's smug sophistical skunkshit. Lipstick is a chemical composition, so is berry juice, and they are both effective for decorating the face. If lipstick has advantages over berry juice then let us praise that part of technology that produced lipstick. The organic world is wonderful, but the inorganic isn't bad, either. The world of plastic and artifice offers its share of magical surprises."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Life isn't simple; it's overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcohol. It's an antilife attitude. These "simple" people who sit around in drab clothes in bleak rooms sipping peppermint tea by candlelight are mocking life. They are unwittingly on the side of death. Death is simple but life is rich. I embrace that richness, the more complicated the better."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Judeo-Christian culture owes its success to the fact that Jehovah never shows his face. What better way to control the masses than through fear of an omnipotent force whose authority can never be challenged because it is never direct?"


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Sometimes...sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things that afford us the greatest privacy."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Why do people fear death so? Because they realize unconsiously at least, that their lives are mere parodies of what living should be. They ache to quit playing at living and to really live, but, alas, it takes time and trouble to piece the loose ends of their lives together and they are dogged by the notion that time is running out."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Ritual, usually, is an action or ceremony employed to create a unity of mind among a congregation or community. The Clock People see the keeping of the clockwords as the last of the communal rituals. With the destruction of the clockworkds, that is, the end of time, all rituals will be personal and idiosyncratic, serving not to unify a ommunity/cult in a common cause but to link each single individual with the universe in whatever manner suits him or her best. Unity will give way to plurality in the Eternity of Joy, although, since the universe is simultaneously many and One, whatever links the individual to the universe will automatically link him or her to all others, even while it enhances his or her completely separate identity in an eternal milk-shake unclabbored by time. Thus, paradoxically, the replacement of societal with individual rituals will bring about an ultimate unity vastly more universal than the plexus of communal rites that presently divides people into unwieldly, agitating and competing groups."


February 24, 1999

Robbins

"Kissing is man's greatest invention. All animals copulate, but only humans kiss. Kissing is the supreme achievement of the Western world."


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers - its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight."


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"If little else, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonethtless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled: you don't have to put it together on Christmas morning.
The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, cless, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain."


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"How else would a woman get stucks in a place like this if it wasn't for a man?"


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"In writing about the Dakotas, it is easy to speak of gods and devils, just as in writing about spiritual matters, it is wise to ignore them."


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences."


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"Wait. Wait a moment, please. Even though we agree that time is relative; that most subjective notions of it are inaccurate just as most objective expressions of it are arbitrary; even though we may seek to extirpate ourselves from the terrible flow of it (to the extent of ignoring an author's plea to "wait a moment, please," for a moment, after all, is a little lump of time); even though we pledge allegiance to the "here and now," or view time as an empty box to fill with our genius, or restructure out concepts of it to conform with those wild tickings at the clockworks; even so, we have come to expect, for better or worse, some sort of chronological order in the books we read, for it is the function of literature to provide what life does not."


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"Sometimes one gets the idea that life thinks it's still living in Paris in the thirties."


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You'd be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise."


February 16, 1999

Robbins

"How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of anothers' personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships."


February 12, 1999

Robbins

"But plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure."


February 12, 1999

Harris

"It is amazing the things we can get used to when we force ourselves. It is perhaps still more amazing what we get used to if we allow ourselves even a moment's complacency. And quite simply it astounds me the things we will settle for and take comfort in once we convince ourselves, This is ours! No matter what this is."


January 23, 1999

Harris

"I admit I don't really know what it means to be one thing or another - black, Jewish, French. I doubt if anyone else does either. But someone is out there making the rules that stop us from being individuals and instead force us into groups, rules that steal away liberty and choice and shrink the realm of possibility.
Let me be free to choose: neighborhood, region, religion, taste in food. Let me honor the gods and cultures of my choice.
Culture - a word, a concept, that is tossed around much these days but never really defined. I have, of course, my own definition: that which people do to help them get through the day, and which in doing as a group tends to define the group.
But does following the practices of a particular group make you one of the group? The tribal Chief in an Inupiak village might say no. I would ask rather, Why not?
I have been Irish on St. Patrick's Day, I eat pasta twice a week, I have an ongoing affair with Mexico. Who was there to tell the small boy in me that I couldn't participate?
The world is mine, I thought, as a young boy. Its cultures can all be mine.
Since I was a small boy, playing at make-believe, I have put myself into the shoes of many men and women. I have lived in my head a life of others. I have been at times a soldier fighting Indians on the American frontier, and then turned around to be a Plains Indian fighting against those same soldiers and against the theft of my land. From the books I read when I was a young invalid, I became black man white woman Asian African Eskimo.
I have lived under the mistaken belief all these years that this was what it meant to be truly American, that not only could I celebrate these cultures and these peoples but that I could somehow be them; that what they shared, I could share in as well, that I could be simply citizen, and by the one word so define myself: citizen first of country, citizen then of the wider world."


January 22, 1999

Harris

"The world he knew was not an easy one, certainly. It was riddled with strife and with the struggle for justice and for fair treatment. In creating the world we now know, the larger society, put restrictions on fairness, but none on hostility and resentfulness."


January 21, 1999

Harris

"The past is a dangerous place to visit. It offers itself as a safety zone. At the same time it is a place as treacherous as hell. It is beauty. It is also burden. It is where we go, many of us, to remind ourselves who we are, and even sometimes to find it out. It is where we go often when what is here and now begins to overwhelm us, when the present begins to tarnish, when it refuses to sparkle and glow. But if we are not careful there in the past, its hypnotic swirls can suck us into a vortex of irreality and disillusion."


January 21, 1999

Malouf

"It was a coincidence of feeling I had known before - on those occasions when, standing before the little landscape in my parent's bedroom at Southport, I had wondered how it was that a picture made by another man in another time and place, and of another landscape, could speak so deeply for my feelings in this one."


January 21, 1999

Malouf

"This high feeling is what it is like to float in time, I tell myself; beyond the limits, beyond the flesh. I reach out and my fingers find a papery dryness. It has the texture of bark and my fingertips see through it into the earth; so that when, quite casually, my grandfather lays his hand on my head and says "Thank you boy," I feel the occasion open to include vast stretches of time, the future as well as the past, in which we in our generations are very small, though not unimportant, and a deep contentment comes over me, as of being and belonging just where I am. It is final. It is also a beginning. I am seated once again at the end of Grandpa's bed, curled up hard against the rails. I do not look up from my book, but his breath fills the spaces of it, and I hear him, very softly, call my name; hear it quite distinctly in his still-familiar voice - the moment is open again. It is as if it had taken all this time - thirty years - for the sound to travel the length of the bed and reach me; as you hear a word spoken sometimes and fail to catch its sense and then later, thirty years later, you hear it clearer and do."


January 21, 1999

Naylor

"When the weather turns this hot, it's enough work just to be yourself."


July 30, 1998

Naylor

"There's a lot of sad things in this world; but a poor man having to keep looking into the eyes of a poor woman with no earthly reason why is one of the saddest I know."


July 29, 1998

Wells

"I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person; or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?"


July 28, 1998

Wells

"Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans."


July 28, 1998

Wells

"There is truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers."


July 28, 1998

Mencken

"Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops."
H.L. Mencken

Carr

"But it never stopped him from working, from pressing ahead, and it's that ability - to work through the self-doubts what any worthwhile human being feels - that is, so far as I can tell, the only thing what separates a meaningful life from a useless one."


July 14, 1998

Carr

"Life is never more tit-for-tat than when you're in a courtroom."


July 14, 1998

Carr

"It always seemed to me that there's two types of people in this life, them what get a kick out of what might be called your odder types and them what don't; and I suppose that I, unlike Mr. Moore, have always been in the first bunch."


July 14, 1998

Delacroix

"Music is the luxury of the imagination."
Delacroix
July 1, 1998

Obst

"People once might have thought that life prepares you to work in the movies. In fact, it's the reverse. Making movies prepares you for life. It's a guerilla version of postmodern existence, an exercise in surviving the mood swings of life in the nineties. To missquote Frank Sinatra, if you can take it here, you can take it anywhere."


July 1, 1998

Obst

"Being on location is more fun than a barrel of monkeys, more fun than any grown-up should be allowed to have. It is summer camp, for adults, a temporary life where art and commerce truly meet."


July 1, 1998

Malouf

"He was speaking of poetry itself, of the hidden part it played in their lives, especially in Australia, though it was common enough - that was the whole point of it - and of their embarrassment when it had, as now, to be brought into the light. How it spoke up, not always in the plainest terms, since that wasn't always possible, but in precise ones just the same, for what it deeply felt and might otherwise go unrecorded: all those unique and repeatable gifts, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the very beginning. To find words for that, to make glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too - that, when it occurs, is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own."


April 30, 1998