Helprin

"I love plants, but have always hated it when people go from one to another saying their names. Quite often, people, especially very rich people, are overcome with joyful contempt when I don't know the name of some lousy fucking plant. "You mean, you don't know that this is a palustral hilychrysum?" I always reply that these plants about which they are so irritatingly reverent don't know what they are, either. And just because, two hundred years ago, a clerk in a Danish arboretum called the vegetable we are discussing a palustral hilychrysum doesn't mean that it really is a palustral hilychrysum. The plant is what it is, palustral hilychrysum be damned."


September 18, 1997

Helprin

"Sometimes love is take away unjustly, but not untul the very end do you stop believing, and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road."


September 18, 1997

Helprin

"If innocence sometimes has a bad name, it is only among those who do not or cannot remember purity."


September 18, 1997

Helprin

"Death comes lightly, but if you are listening, you can hear it even far away."


September 18, 1997

Helprin

"The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life itself is a string of them, like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy."


September 3, 1997

Helprin

"How could anyone deliberately shut out the air? Buildings with windows that don't open may be economical but they are also insane."


September 3, 1997

Helprin

"From my position in the garden, in a fume of early light, I cannot understand the notion of banality. So many people spend so much time protecting themselves from the ordinary and the worn that it seems as if half the world runs on a defensive principle that robs it of the tested and the true. Buf if the truth is common, must it be rejected? If the ordinary is beautiful, must it be scorned? They needn't be, and are not, by those who are free enough to see anew. The human soul itself is quite ordinary, existing by the billion, and on a crowded street you pass souls a thousand times a minute. And yet within the soul is a graceful shining song more wonderful than the stunning cathedrals that stand over the countryside unique and alone. The simple songs are the best. They last into time as inviolably as the light."


August 27, 1997

Helprin

"How can you know history? You can only imagine it. Anchored though you may be in fact and docuument, to write a history is to write a novel with checkpoints, for you must subject the real and absolute truth, too wide and varied for any but god to comprehend, to the idiosyncratic constraints of your own understanding. A "definitive" history is only one in which someone has succeeded not in recreating the past but in casting it according to his own lights, in defining it. Even the most vivid portrayal must be full of sorrow, for it illuminates the darkness of memory with mere flashes and sparks, and what the past begs for is not a few bright pictures but complete reconstitution. Short of that, you can only follow the golden threads, and they are always magnificently tangled."


August 16, 1997

Helprin

"I wish the world would stop hurtling ahead at such great speed. I wish that tranquility would, by action, cease to be overawed."


August 16, 1997

Helprin

"The ape is an animal that you hope, as you watch it accomplishing its isometrics against the iron bars restraining it, will break through even if it means that it may then turn its attention to you, because you have enough idealistic principle left, planted by nuns, priests, or rabbis, to wish for his freedom. That we put him in a cage is beneficial to us but a rather obvious transgression of the golden rule."


August 16, 1997

Faulkner

"Sometimes I ain't so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain't. Sometimes I think it ain't none of us pure crazy and ain't none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it."


July 30, 1997

Faulkner

"Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he don't like to admit it to them until they have beards. After they have a beard they are too busy because they don't know if they'll ever quite make it back to where they were in sense before they was haired, so you don't mind admitting them to folks that are worrying about the same thing that ain't worth the worry that you are yourself."


July 30, 1997

Faulkner

"When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off ans there's noting to the doing them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again."


July 30, 1997

Faulkner

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it not yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is-is not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."


July 30, 1997

Faulkner

"But I reckon Cora's right when she says the reason the Lord had to create women is because man don't know his own good when he sees it."


July 21, 1997

Fulghum

"If I were absolutely certain about all things, I would spend my life in anxious misery, fearful of losing my way. But since everything and anything are always possible, the miraculous is always nearby and wonders shall never, ever cease."


July 17, 1997

Rushdie

"...the real world was full of magic, so magical words could easily be real."


July 17, 1997

Angelou

Ships?
Sure, I'll sail them.
Show me the boat,
If it'll float,
I'll sail it.

Men?
Yes, I'll love them.
If they've got style,
To make me smile,
I'll love them.

Life?
'Course I'll live it.
Just enough breath,
Until my death,
And I'll live it.

Failure?
I'm not ashamed to tell it,
I never learned to spell it!
Not failure.

Maya Angelou
June 7, 1997

Angelou

"Some people who exist sparingly on the mean side of the hill are threatened by those who also live in the shadows but who celebrate the light.
It seems easier to lie prone than to press against the law of gravity and raise the body onto its feet and persist in remaining vertical.
There are many incidents which can eviscerate the stalwart and bring the mighty down. In order to survive, the ample soul needs refreshments and reminders daily of its rights to be and to be wherever it finds itself."


June 7, 1997

Angelou

"My dears, I draw the picture of the wealthy couple standing in a darkened hallway, peering into a lighted room where black servants were lifting their voices in merriment and comradery, and I realize that living well is an art which can be developed. Of course, you will need the basic talents to build upon: They are a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings, an assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift. That people who may differ from you in political stance, sexual persuasion, and racial inheritance can be founts of fun, and if you are lucky, they can become even convivial comrades.
Living life as art requires a readiness to forgive. I do not mean that you should suffer fools gladly, but rather remember your own shortcomings, and when you encounter another with flaws, don't be eager to righteously seal yourself away from the offender forever. Take a few breaths and imagine yourself having just committed the action which has set you at odds.
Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. We leave our homes for work, acting and even believing that we will reach our destinations with no unusual event startling us out of our set expectations. The truth is we know nothing, not where our cars will fail or when our buses will stall, whether our places of employment will be there when we arrive, or whether, in fact, we ourselves will arrive whole and alive at the end of our journeys. Life is pure adventure, the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.
Life seems to love the lover of it. Money and power can liberate only if they are used to do so. They can imprison and inhibit more finally than barred windows and iron chains."


June 7, 1997

Jingsheng

"But there are many times when I wish I were still the easygoing and carefree child I once was; adults' brains are terribly complex, and much more vulgar, dull, and insincere than a child's."


June 4, 1997

Guterson

"This was what his father had taught him: the greater the composure, the more revealed one was, the truth of one's inner life was manifest- a pleasing paradox."


April 1, 1997

Conrad

"Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love- and to put his trust in life!"


January 26, 1997

Conrad

"...but the power of calumny grows with time. It's insidious and penetrating. It can even destroy one's faith in oneself- dry-rot the soul."


January 26, 1997

Conrad

"One of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love- the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams!"


January 19, 1997

Conrad

"Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our intelligence and our feelings."


January 10, 1997

Fulghum

"Life is- and we are- byproducts of combustion. Imagination turned to form and finally, memory."


December 30, 1996

Fulghum

"Thank God for these real-life accidents that keep us from the boredom of perfection."


December 30, 1996

Kundera

"There are people who claim to love humanity, while others object that we can love only in the singular, that is, only individuals. I agree and add that what goes for love also goes for hate. Man, this being pining for equilibrium, balances the weight of the evil piled on his back with the weight of his hatred. But try directing your hatred at mere abstract principles, at injustice, fanaticism, cruelty, or, if you've managed to find the human principle itself hateful, then try hating mankind! Such hatreds are beyond human capacity, and so man, if he wishes to relieve his anger (aware as he is of its limited power) concentrates it on a single individual."


December 29, 1996

Kundera

"There is nothing rare about the merging of the bodies of two strangers. Even the union of souls may occasionally take place. What is a thousand times more rare is the union of the body with its own soul in shared passion..."


December 29, 1996

Kundera

"I do see things as they are, but in addition to these visible things I see the invisble. It's not for nothing that fantasy exists. It's what makes homes of our houses."


December 26, 1996

Sand

"Vice never sees its own ugliness- if it did, it would be frightened by its own image. Shakespeare's Iago, who behaves in a way that's true to his nature, sounds false because he is forced by our dramatic conventions to unmask himself, to himself be the one to lay bare the secrets of his complex and crooked heart. In reality, man seldom tramples his conscience under foot so casually; he turns it this way and that, pushes and pulls at it, twists it out of shape, and when he has distorted it, made it flabby and shapeless, worn it out, he then keeps it at his side like an indulgent master whom he pretends to fear, consult, and obey but who in reality gives in to his every whim or desire."


December 8, 1996

Sand

"A one-sided, misdirected love is as different from a shared love as error is from truth, and even if our feverish feelings fool us into thinking that we are experiencing love in all its power, we will learn later, when we taste the delights of true love, how completely wrong we were."


December 8, 1996

Celine

"Excitement's everything in life!
Got to know how to use it!
Excitement's everything in life!
When you're dead, it's over!"


November 16, 1996

Malraux

"Through words, he could do almost nothing; but beyond words there were the things which gestures, looks, mere presence were capable of expressing. He knew from experience that the worst suffering is in the solitude which accompanies it. To express it also gives it relief; but few words come less readily to men's tongues than those of their deep griefs."


September 7, 1996

Carter

"Through that short winter day, I lay in my secret place. And my spirit didn't hurt anymore. I was washed clean by the feeling song of the wind and the trees and the spring branch and the birds.

They didn't care or understand how the body minds worked, no more than the men of body minds understood or cared for them. So they did not tell me about hell, or ask me where I come from, or say anything about evil atall. Thery didn't know such word-feelings; and a little while I had forgot them too."
Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree

I had no idea who "Forrest" Carter actually was until last weekend. I am torn about keeping these passages in my commonplace books. Would I own a piece of art painted by Charles Manson? Would I in any way indulge in the legitimization of a person who is anathema to everything I am and believe? Can I divorce the man from the art? I don't know the answer to this.


August 29, 1996

Carter

"Granpa said it was the silliest damn thing in the world to go around killing something for sport. He said the whole thing, more than likely, was thought up by politicians between wars when they wasn't gittin' people killed so they could keep their hands in on killing. Granpa said that idjits taken it up without a lick of thinking at it, but if you could check it out- politicians started it. Which is likely."

I had no idea who "Forrest" Carter actually was until last weekend. I am torn about keeping these passages in my commonplace books. Would I own a piece of art painted by Charles Manson? Would I in any way indulge in the legitimization of a person who is anathema to everything I am and believe? Can I divorce the man from the art? I don't know the answer to this.


August 25, 1996

Carter

"Gramma said everybody has two minds. One of the minds has to do with the necessaries for body living. You had to use it to figure how to get shelter and eating and such like for the body. She said you had to use it to mate and have young'uns and such. She said we had to have that mind so as we could carry on. But she said we had another mind that had nothing atall to do with such. She said it was the spirit mind.
Gramma said if you used the body-living mind to think greedy or mean; if you was always cuttin' at folks with it and figuring how to material profit off'n them... then you would shrink up your spirit mind to a size no bigger'n a hickor'nut.
Gramma said that when your body died, the body-living mind died with it, and if that's the way you had thought all your life there you was, stuck with a hickor'nut spirit, as the spirit mind was all that lived when everything else died. Then, gramma said, when you was all born back- as you was bound to be- then, there you was, born with a hickor'nut spirit mind that had practical no understanding of anything.
Then it might shrink up to the size of a pea and could disappear, if the body-living mind took over total. In such case, you lost your spirit comlete.
That's how you become dead people. Gramma said you could easy spot dead people. She said dead people when they looked at a woman saw nothing but dirty; when they looked at other people they saw nothing but bad; when they looked at a tree they saw nothing but lumber and profit; never beauty. Gramma said they was dead people walking around.
Gramma said that the spirit mind was like any other muscle. If you used it it got bigger and stronger. She said the only way it could get that way was usung it to understand, but you couldn't open the door to it until you quit being greedy and such with your body mind. Then understanding commenced to take up, and the more you tried to understand, the bigger it got.

Natural, she said, understanding and love was the same thing; except folks went at it back'ards too many times, trying to pretend they loved things when they didn't understand them. Which can't be done."

I had no idea who "Forrest" Carter actually was until last weekend. I am torn about keeping these passages in my commonplace books. Would I own a piece of art painted by Charles Manson? Would I in any way indulge in the legitimization of a person who is anathema to everything I am and believe? Can I divorce the man from the art? I don't know the answer to this.


August 25, 1996

Carter

"You cannot write poetry about the death-stiffened baby in his mother's arms, staring at the jolting sky with eyes that will not close; while his mother walks.
You cannot sing songs of the father laying down the burden of his wife's corpse, to lie by it through the night and to rise and carry it again in the morning- and tell his oldest son to carry the body of his youngest. And do not look...nor speak...nor cry...nor remember the mountains."


August 20, 1996

Carter

"Trailing through the mountains in the winters evening sun
Walking through patterns on the trail
Sloping toward the cabin; been on the turkey run
It's a haven that the Cherokee knows well.

Watch along the mountain rim and see the morning birth
Listen for the windsong through the tree
Feel the life a' springing from Mon-o-Lah, the earth
And you'll know The Way of all the Cherokee.

Know the death in life is here every breaking day
That one without the other, cannot be
Learn the wisdom of Mon-o-Lah,
And then you'll know the way
And touch the soul of all the Cherokee."

I had no idea who "Forrest" Carter actually was until last weekend. I am torn about keeping these passages in my commonplace books. Would I own a piece of art painted by Charles Manson? Would I in any way indulge in the legitimization of a person who is anathema to everything I am and believe? Can I divorce the man from the art? I don't know the answer to this.


December 20, 1996

Kundera

"Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: "They are gazing at God's windows." A person gazing at God's windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks."


Auguest 14, 1996

Hilton

"Like many men who have suffered deficiencies in early education, he had more than made up for them since; except that he had failed to acquire the really unique thing a good early education can bequeath- the ability to grow up and forget about it."


July 28, 1996

Vonnegut

"So I said goodbye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason."


July 21, 1996

Vonnegut

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."


July 21, 1996

Ellison

"Who knows but that, on the lower frequenceies, I speak for you?"


June 21, 1996

Ellison

"Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?- diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat."


June 21, 1996

Rushdie

"Defeated love is still a treasure, and those who choose lovelessness have won no victory at all."


May 6, 1996

Rushdie

"Item, personality was homogeneous and men were to be held responsible for their acts!- Quite the reverse: we were such contradictory entities that the concept of personality itself ceased, under close scrutiny, to have meaning!- God existed! - God was dead!- One might, indeed one was obliged to, speak confidently of the externalness of the absolutes!- Good grief, but that was the purest drivel; relatively speaking, of course!-"


May 6, 1996

Rushdie

"And if the reality of our being is that so many covert truths exist behind Maya-Veils of unknowing and illusion, then why not Heaven and Hell, too? Why not God and the Devil and the whole blast damned thing? If so much revelation, why not Revelation?- Please."


April 29, 1996

Rushdie

"Keep your disapproval! Put it where the sun don't shine! Go sit in a movie theatre and take not that the guy getting the biggest cheers is no longer the loverboy or hero- it's the guy in the black hat, stabbing shooting and kickboxing and generally pulverising his way through the film! O baby. Violence today is hot. It is what people want."
Salman Rushdie, The Moors Last Sigh
April 23, 1996

Murphy

Balls

They say that men have two.
The left hangs rather low.
Yet women have more of them
than any man I know.

Neil Murphy
April 11, 1996

Rushdie

"...I was secretly rejoicing in all that empacted humanity, in being pushed so tightly together that privacy ceased to exist and the boundaries of our self began to dissolve, that feeling which we only get when we are in crowds, or in love."


April 8, 1996

Rushdie

"Southpaw, sinister, cuddly-wiftie, keggy-fistie, corrie-paw: what a vocabulary of denigration clusters around left-handedness! What an infinity of small humiliations await the non-dextrous round every corner!"


April 8, 1996

Kundera

"I think therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everyting that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can dount its unique amd uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism."


March 14, 1996

Kundera

"It is a part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel (decide to feel, just as Don Quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling."


March 11, 1996

Kundera

"A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don't understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love... It's naive to believe that our image is only an illusion that conceals our selves, as the one true essence independent of the eyes of the world. The imagologues have revealed with cynical radicalism that the reverse is true: our self is a mere illusion, ungraspable, indescribable, misty, which the only reality, all too easily graspable and describable, is our image in the eyes of others. And the worst thing about it is that you are not its master. First you try to paint it yourself, then you want at least to influence and control it, but in vain: a single malicious phrase is enough to change you forever into a depressingly simple caricature."


March 11, 1996

Kundera

"Because that's how things are, and this goes for everyone: we will never find out why we irritate people, what bothers people about us, what they find ridiculous; for us our own image is our greatest mystery."


March 3, 1996

Kundera

"If there were fewer funeral marches there might be fewer deaths. Understand what I'm trying to say: respect for tragedy is much more dangerous than the thoughtlessness of childish prattle. Do you realize what is the eternal precondition of tragedy? The existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life. And what is the precondition of wars? The same thing. They drive you to death because presumably there is something greater than your life. War can only exist in a world of tragedy; from the beginning of history man has known only a tragic world and has not been capable of stepping out of it. The age of tragedy can be ended only by the revolt of frivolity. Nowadays, people no longer know Beethoven's Ninth from concerts but from four lines of the Ode to Joy that they hear every day in the ad for Bella perfume. That doesn't shock me. Tragedy will be driven from the world like a ludicrous old actress clutching her heart and declaiming in a hoarse voice. Frivolity is a radical diet for weight reduction. Things will lose ninety percent of their meaning and will become light. In such a weightless environment fanaticism will disappear. War will become impossible."


March 3, 1996

Kundera

"Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for their added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear."


February 29, 1996

Kundera

"Man reckons with immortality, but forgets to reckon with death."


February 28, 1996

Kundera

"Why all this passion? Agnes asked hserself, and she thought: When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over your surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self. Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that archillusion, we cannot live, or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplacable essence."


February 21, 1996

Kundera

"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the we are ageless."


February 21, 1996

McCall

"There is no such thing as casual dating once a woman gives her body to you."


February 21, 1996

Dostoyevsky

"It's not worth one single tear of the martyred little girl who beat her breast with her tiny fist, shedding her innocent tears and praying "sweet prayers" to rescue her in the stinking outhouse. It's not worth it, because that tear will have remained unatoned for. And those tears must be atoned for; otherwise there can be no harmony. But what could atone for those tears? How is it possible to atone for them? By avenging them perhaps? But whom would vengeance help? What good would it do to send the monsters to hell after they have finished inflicting their suffering on children? How can their being in hell put things right? Besides, what sort of harmony can there be as long as there is a hell? To me, harmony means forgiving and embracing everybody, and I don't want anyone to suffer anymore. And if the suffering of little children is needed to complete the sum total of suffering required to pay for the truth, I don't want that truth, and I declare in advance that all the truth in the world is not worth that price."


February 9, 1996

Dostoyevsky

"But then, what about the children? How will we ever account for their sufferings? For the hundreth time, I repeat, there are many questions that could be asked, but I ask you only one- about the children- because I believe it conveys fully and clearly what I am trying to tell you. Listen, even if we assume that every person must suffer because his suffering is necessary to pay for eternal harmony, still do tell me, for God's sake, where the children come in. I can understand the concept of solidarity in sin and also solidarity in retribution. But how can there be solidarity in sin with small children? And if it is true that children share the responsibility for the sins committed by their fathers, then that concept must be true in some different world from the world I know, and it is quite beyond my grasp. Some joker may say that the child will grow up and have time to sin later, but, for instance, the eight-year-old boy who was torn to pieces by the hounds was never given a chance to grow up and sin."


February 9, 1996

Dostoyevsky

"I think that if the devil doesn't exist and is therefore man's creation, man has made him in his own image."


February 9, 1996

Dostoyevsky

"People often describe such human cruelty as "bestial," but that's, of course, unfair to animals, for no beast could ever be as cruel as man, I mean as refinedly and artistically cruel. The tiger simply gnaws and tears his victim to pieces because that's all he knows. It would never occur to a tiger to nail people to fences by their ears, even if he were able to do it."


February 9, 1996

Dostoyevsky

"Besdies, a man is seldom willing to acknowledge another's suffering, as if suffering placed one in a superior position."


February 9, 1996

Broyard

"Thinking is a form of hypochondria."


January 23, 1996

Broyard

"It takes a while for betrayal to register. At first you deny it. You say, Don't be silly, or It's not possible. Then there's a dead spot, a silence, a regrouping. After that you go slowly, gradually through the character of the other person. You examine all the evidence against the idea of betrayal and you say, No, it can't be.
Then, like a door swinging on its hinges in a draft, you go back over your history together. You begin to imagine betrayal as a hypothesis- an absurd hypothesis, a bad joke. Skeptically, playfully, you concede that the circumstances could be interpreted that way, but only if it was somebody else who was betrayed, not you. And then, suddenly, you know that it's true."


January 23, 1996

Broyard

"Everyone wants to see himself as disappointed- it's the influence of modern art."


January 18, 1996

Angelou

"We can too easily become what we are called with all the unwelcome responsibilities the title makes us heir to."


January 18, 1996

Angelou

"Women should be tough, tender laugh as much as possible, and live long lives. The struggle for equality continues unabated, and the woman warrior who is armed with wit and courage will be among the first to celebrate victory."


January 16, 1996

Angelou

"Being a woman is hard work. Not without joy and even ecstacy, but still relentless, unending work. Becoming an old female may require only being born with certain genitalia, inherently long-living genes and the fortune not to be run over by an out of control truck, but to become and remain a woman commands the existence and employment of genius."


January 16, 1996

Styron

"This concerns not the familiar threshold of pain but a parallel phenomenon, and that is the probable inability of the psyche to absorb pain beyond predictable limits of time. There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits super human endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accomodations to the pain's demands- to accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it. Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to the alleviation, whether it be through sleep or tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body's capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive for having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul."


December 7, 1995

Broyard

"If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been completely at the mercy of sex. There was hardly anything else powerful enough to distract or deflect us; we'd have been crawling after sex, writhing over it all the time. Books enabled us to see ourselves as characters- yes, we were characters!- And this gave us a bit of control."


January 16, 1996

Bach

"Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it."


January 16, 1996

Bach

"Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us!"


January 16, 1996

Bach

"Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideals without being sure they'll work. One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems- wars, religions, nations, destructions- to refuse to be a part of them, and express instead the highest selves we know how to be."


January 16, 1996

Bach

"You think you don't belong in this world with its wars and destruction, its hatred and its violence? Why do you live here"?


January 14, 1996

Dumas

"Such is the horror of nothingness in man, that he believes he still survives in the sentiments which he has inspired, and he in some measure consoles himself for leaving the world by thinking of the regrets which will accompany his memory, and of the pity which will visit his tomb."


December 16, 1995

Dumas

"If one always began by seeing things in their worst light, one would never attempt anything."


December 13, 1995

Dumas

"It is the property of every sorrow which overtakes us to reawaken past griefs which we believed dead, but which were only sleeping. The soul has its scars as well as the body and they are seldom so well healed, but a new wound can reopen them."


December 12, 1995

Vonnegut

"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."


December 2, 1995

Vonnegut

"How embarrassing to be human."


December 2, 1995

Vonnegut

""At least we still have freedom of speech," I said.
And she said "That isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you have to give yourself.""


December 2, 1995

Vonnegut

"They all believe that the white people who insisted that it was their constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone." You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise."


December 2, 1995

Vonnegut

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
And the worst flaw is that we're just plain dumb. Admit it.
You think Auschwitz was intelligent?"


December 2, 1995

Miller

"One can bear so many things if only there is one in the world to call a friend."


November 14, 1995

Kerouac

"But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious."


November 6, 1995

Kerouac

"After all a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world in pointed against him."


November 1, 1995

Dickey

Home?
Which way is that?
Is it this vacant lot? These woven fences?
Or is it hundreds
Of miles away, where I am the keeper
Of rooms turning night and day
Into memory?

James Dickey
October 20, 1995

Anderson

"When an American stays away from New York too long, something happens to him: Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little afraid."
Sherwood Anderson
October 1, 1995

Conrad

"But a man is a child always."


September 25, 1995

Hilton

"I loathe war, not only for its pain and misery and life wastage, but for its enthronement of the second-rate- in men, standards, and ideals."
James Hilton
Augist 31, 1995

Kundera

"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect manking has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."


August 7, 1995

Kundera

"Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which are bad is that in a given situation we can make out only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions."


August 7, 1995

Kundera

"But we no longer know how to think as Parmenides thought."


August 7, 1995

Kundera

"They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms, a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."


August 1, 1995

Kundera

"Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."


July 30, 1995

Fitzgerald

"Scott reads Marx-I read the Cosmological philosophers. The brightest moments of our day are when we get them mixed up."
Zelda Fitzgerald, letter
July 28, 1995

Fitzgerald

"Anyway, there's nothing so sordid as being shut up-when man is no longer his own master, custodian of his own silly vanities and childish contentments he's nothing at all-being in the first place only an agent of a very experimental stage of organic free will-"
Zelda Fitzgerald, letter to Scott
July 28, 1995

Sade

"Had man been formed wholly good, man should never have been able to do evil, and only then would the work be worthy of a god. To allow man to choose was to tempt him; amd God's infinite powers very well advised him of what would be the result."


June 16, 1995

Fulghum

"This response to crisis-with strangers or friends or family-is part of our nature. Every day, every week, every year since time began. Whatever the size or nature of the crisis, this has been true of the human community. A fact that must be laid alongside all we know of the horror of man's inhumanity to man. Few of us do not have a story to tell-of what we gave or what was given to us in response to "Help me, help me." We are capable of being agents of one another's revival. None of us can go all the way alone.
Even in the midst of the unbearable agonies of prisons and concentration camps, there are those who choose to help-to give to others: bread, shoes, comfort, whatever. These acts of compassion are the shining, diamond-tough confirmations of human dignity. This is keeping our affairs in order at the highest level. This is communion in its highest form. The ritual of the keeping of the living flame. Held daily in the unfinished cathedral of the human spirit."


June 7, 1995

Fulghum

"It never makes sense to wait until your life is in a perfect state of grace to celebrate its joys and passages. Never hesitate to celebrate."


June 3, 1995

Fulghum

"It is said there is no limit to the amount of good a person can do if he does not mind who gets the credit. This is enlightenment. This is seeing one's self as an integrated part of the creative forces of life and not just an occasional contributor."


May 31, 1995

Wiesel

"War, war, what filth. What butchery. And, above all, what chaos."


May 18, 1995

Wiesel

"As for the Nazis, we spoke of them as of a disagreeable disease, not serious and surely not fatal. We told ourselves: Every society has its misfits, and so does ours, one day they would be discarded, thrown into the trashcan of history. The threats, the ramblings, the obscene delirium of a Goebbels or a Goering or their ridiculous Fuhrer did not even annoy us. We thought: They are barking, let them bark, surely they will wear themselves out. Hauptmann called Nazism a marginal sect. Lacking education and mass support, it could not possibly influence events. History cannot be changed by a few anti-Semitic speeches. Fighting them would give them too much importance, do them too much honor. Better not turn them into adversaries. Our real adversaries were much closer: the trade union movement, the Socialists, the Social Democrats. The Nazis were no more than a diversion."


May 18, 1995

Wiesel

"You are looking for the bark, not the tree; you seek understanding, not knowledge; you aspire to justice, not to truth. But poor soul- what would you do if you learned that truth itself is unjust? You may tell me that's impossible, but who's to say? No-we must do everything in our power to make it impossible."


May 7, 1995

Wiesel

"Long ago, it was thought that if a Jew was poor it was because of society; if he suffered it was because of Exile; people forgot that it is also our fault, mine and yours...If it is given to man to commit injustices, it is also up to him to repair them; if the creation of the world bears the seal of God, its order bears the seal of man."


May 7, 1995

Barth

"A story first heard is a virgin bride, who so takes us with her freshness that we care nothing for her style. A good tale retold is a beloved wife or long-prized lover, whose art we relish because no novelty distracts us."


April 27, 1995

Hesse

"A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession."


April 12, 1995

Morrison

"What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?
The way I want it?
Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?
What's the point? I can't change it.
That's the point. If you don't, it will change you. And it'll be your fault cause you let it."


March 10, 1995

Ondaatje

"A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water."


February 5, 1995

Thackeray

"...every beauty of art or nature made him thankful as well as happy; and that the pleasure to be had in listening to fine music, as in looking at the stars in the sky, or at a beautiful landscape or picture, was a benefit for which we might thank Heaven as sincerely as for any other worldy blessings."


December 31, 1994

Thackeray

"I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valor so far beyond every other quality"?


December 15, 1994

Koestler

"Philosophy is too serious to be left to the philosophers."


October 17, 1994

Helprin

"Why do generals walk around like generals?...They lose soldiers all the time. If they were businessmen they'd be bankrupt. Why is it that if you lose souls you're less accountable than if you lose money?"


October 8, 1994

Helprin

"One shouldn't do anything to protect one's dignity. You either have it or you don't."


September 19, 1994

Helprin

"It passed one by, for when I was young I was sure of the good of the world, its beauty, and its ultimate justice. And even when I was broken the way one sometimes can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising thay I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shining ever brighter. And nearly every time subsequently that I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they had obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter."


September 18, 1994

Helprin

"But of what are you a professor?
Aesthetics.
What are aesthetics?
The study of beauty.
Beauty? What for?
Beauty. Why not."


September 18, 1994

Anderson

"I felt I had something to say. That's why I've always done it. You know that saying, Dad--if you touch one person, just one, that's enough. To me, that's bullshit. One is not enough, not nearly enough. I suppose it would be if everyone was trying to say something. But they aren't."


September 18, 1994

Paton

"There is a hard law that when a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive."


September 1, 1994

Paton

"But one does not always count one's blessings."


September 1, 1994

Paton

"What foolish things we do to cover ourselves, and by doing them are uncovered."


August 26, 1994

Fitzgerald

"...--It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Show Mr. And Mrs. F. To Number--"
August 3, 1994

Fitzgerald

"Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits--from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful resignation that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. That was the rash gift of Alfred E. Smith to the citizens of New York."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "My Lost City"
August 3, 1994

Fitzgerald

"Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were--and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who where young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings anymore."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age"
July 31, 1994

Somerset Maugham

"But I am I. I don't want to dream anyone else's dream. I want to dream my own."


July 31, 1994

Somerset Maugham

"Resignation? That's the refuge of the beaten. Keep your resignation. I don't want it. I'm not willing to accept evil and ugliness and injustice. I'm not willing to stand by while the good are punished and the wicked go scot-free."


July 31, 1994

Somerset Maugham

"My life has been a journey of truth and there can be no compromise with truth...Truth is the goal of life."


July 31, 1994

Somerset Maugham

"Critics divide writers into those who have something to say and do not know how to say it, and those who know how to say it and have nothing to say. Often it is the same with men, with Anglo-Saxons at all events, to whom words come difficultly. When a man is fluent it is sometimes because he has said a thing so often that it has lost its meaning, and his speech is most significant when he has to fashion it laboriously from thoughts to which he can see no clear outline."


July 26, 1994

Allende

"...if freedom is the first right of man, with even greater reason it should be the right of creatures born with wings on their backs."


July 10, 1994

Somerset Maugham

"I have always been interested in the oddities of mankind. At one time I read a good deal of philosophy and a good deal of science, and I learned in that way that nothing was certain. Some people, by the pursuit of science, are impressed by the dignity of man, but I was only made conscious of his inconsequence. The greatest questions of all have been thrashed out since he aquired the beginnings of civilization and he is as far from the solution as ever. Man can know nothing, for his senses are his only means of knowledge, and they can give no certainty. There is only one subject upon which the individual can speak with authority, and that is his own mind, but even here he is surrounded with darkness."


June 20, 1994

Somerset Maugham

"What else is the world than a figure? Life itself is but a symbol. You must be a wise man if you can tell us what is reality."


June 20, 1994

Havel

"The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle."


May 29, 1994

Conrad

"A universal experience is exactly the sort of thing which is most difficult to appraise justly in a particular instance."


May 28, 1994