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

Malouf

"Chance, life, fate - whatever it was - chose for you, connecting and binding you into the pattern of other people's lives, and making that at last the pattern of your own."


April 24, 1998

Malouf

"It was the word he had used, rubbish, that Digger wanted to go back to. What came back to him at times, and too clearly, was that break in the forest and the fires he had tended there. It had given him such an awareness of just what it is that life throws up, and when it has no more use for it, throws off again. Not just ashes and bones, but the immense pile of debris that any one life might make if you were to gather up and look at the whole of it: all that it had worn out, used up, mislaid, pawned, forgotten, and carried out each morning to be tipped into a bin. Think of it. Then think of it multiplied by millions.
What he would have wanted given the power, was to take it all back again, down to the last razor blade and button off a baby's bootee, and see it restored. Impossible, of course.
He wanted nothing to be forgotten and cast into the flames. Not a soul. Not a pin."


April 24, 1998

Holmes

"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris."
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Hayslip

"I had come home. Yes. But home had changed. And I would always be in between south, north, east, west, peace, war, Viet Nam, America. It is my fate to be in between Heaven and Earth. When we resist our fate we suffer, when we accept it we are happy. We have time in abundance, an eternity to repeat our mistakes. But we need only once to correct our mistakes and at last hear the song of enlightenment with which we can break the chain of vengeance forever. In your heart you can feel it now. It's the song your spirit has been singing since the moment of your birth. If the monks were right and nothing happens without a cause, then the gift of suffering is to bring us closer to God. To teach us to be strong when we are weak. To be brave when we are afraid. To be wise in the midst of confusion. And to let go of that whcih we can no longer hold. Lasting victories are won in the heart, not in this land or that."


April 6, 1998

Lu

"Poetry is common to all people, with youth it speaks of love, with parents it speaks of families, with older people it speaks of the past. People may do as they please. Whether or not a revolution comes to overturn rotten societies, or change that merely alters them a little bit, whatever political changes may or may not take place, there will still be youngsters, there will still be mothers, there will still be old men; in short, there will still be people who know love, who know happiness, who know pain. Poetry is for them... The human heart is...always the human heart.
It is not that we are unaware of the urgent duties of the times, that we are unaware of the pressing demands of a new life. It is not that we do not realize that the responsibility of writers today is heavy, is perilous, and to be [met] properly must serve the majority, serve the masses. But we also know that beyond the literature of struggle, the literature of a period, there is also a literature that is enternal.
We cannot for any reason neglect the following point. The literature that is etnernal takes the human heart at its base... In truth it has no East, no West, no modernity, no antiquity. It has a perpetual essence, like times, because it comes from the human heart, a human heart that remains unchanged through the ages."
Luu Trong Lu
March 9, 1998

Barth

"Reality is wonderful; reality is dreadful; reality is what it is. But realism is a fucking bore."


February 8, 1998

Barth

"We are inspired with the joy of being alive and of our life together; our extraordinary good fortune in each other and our privilege in the world; the preciousness of such an hour, such a morning, on such a planet."


February 8, 1998

Nabokov

"Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."


January 23, 1998

Wharton

"It was very well to say that he 'wasn't that kind of man' - the kind to tire of a woman as soon as she could be had. That was all just words; in matters of sex and sentiment, as he knew, a man was a different kind of man in every case that presented itself."


January 1, 1998

Wharton

"When a man loved a woman, she was always the age he wanted her to be; when he had ceased to, she was either too old for witchery or too young for technique."


January 1, 1998

Morrison

"She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't, and because what difference does it make?"


January 1, 1998

Hilton

"I never think any kind of love is silly. And I'm not sure what the difference is between being in love and having an idea you are - especially when you're young."


December 23, 1997

Vonnegut

"That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness."


November 24, 1997

Vonnegut

"Listen: We are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!"


November 24, 1997

Vonnegut

"I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. That word was Nagasaki."


November 24, 1997

Vonnegut

"I am eternally grateful... for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else may be going on."


November 24, 1997

Vonnegut

"In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse."


November 24, 1997

Vonnegut

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts."


November 20, 1997

Vonnegut

"The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"


November 20, 1997

Kundera

"This is how kitsch-making interpretation kills off works of art... Kitsch-making interpretation is actually not the personal defect of some early-twentieth-century Prague conductor (many conductors after him have ratified his alterations of Jenufa); it is a seduction that comes out of the collective unconscious; a command from the metaphysical prompter; a perennial social imperative; a force. That force is aimed not at art alone but primarily at reality itself. It does the opposite of what Flaubert, Janacek, Joyce, and Hemingway did. It throws a veil of commonplaces over the present moment, in order that the face of the real will disappear.
So that you shall never know what you have lived."


October 26, 1997

Kundera

"As if behind the art of melody, there hid two possible intentionalities contrary to one another: as if a Bach fugue, by bringing us to contemplate a beauty of being that is outside the subjective, aimed to make us forget our moods, our passions and pains, ourselves; and as if on the other hand Romantic melody aimed to make us plunge into ourselves, feel the self with a terrible intensity, and forget everything outside."


October 26, 1997