Eliot

"The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them-- like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols."


April 16, 2001

Eliot

"It is true that Grandcourt went about with the sense that he did not care a languid curse for any one's admiration; but this state of not-caring, just as much as desire, required its related object-- namely, a world of admiring or envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons, the persons must be there and they must smile-- a rudimentary truth which is surely forgotten by those who complain of mankind as generally contemptible, since any other aspect of the race must disappoint the voracity of their contempt."


April 14, 2001

Eliot

"I call a man fanatical when his enthusiasm is narrow and hoodwinked, so that he has no sense of proportions, and becomes unjust and unsympathetic to men who are out of his own track."


April 13, 2001

Eliot

"The inspirations of the world have come in that way too: even strictly-measuring science could hardly have got on without that forecasting ardour which feels the agitations of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in its preconception that surmounts many failures of experiment. And in relation to human motives and actions, passionate belief as a fuller efficacy. Here enthusiasm may have the validity of proof, and, happening in one soul, give the type of what will one day be general."


April 13, 2001

Eliot

"There are personages who feel themselves tragic because they march into a palpable morass, dragging another with them, and then cry out against al the gods."


April 12, 2001

Eliot

"The truth is something different from the habitual lazy combinations begotten by our wishes."


April 12, 2001

Eliot

"Goodness is a large, often a protective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future: is the germ prospering in the darkness? at another, it has put forth delicate green blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage has its peculiar blight, and may have the healthy life choked out of it by a particular action of the foul land which rears or neighbours it, or by damage brought from foulness afar."


April 12, 2001

Westbrook

"The slice of Los Angeles which devotes itself to the entertainment industry was still a self-inclosed world in which the shabby and the miraculous walked hand in hand, and the American dream was not so much a metaphor as a larcenous glint in every passing eye."


February 6, 2001

Fitzgerald

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."


February 6, 2001

Martinez

"If there is an elegance to humanity, some of it must lie in the way we bear grief. To bear it without rancor ennobles us in ways too fragile to define."
Al Martinez
"Petals in a breeze"-- L.A. Times
February 4, 2001

Westbrook

"Good dialogue was almost as hard to come by as true love, and perhaps more lasting."


February 4, 2001

Morris

"It is a rare experience for certain young people to see great quantities of books in a private habitat for the first time, and to hear ideas talked about seriously in the off hours. Good God, they were doing it for pleasure, or so it seemed."


December 18, 2000

Morrris

"Nihilism was more articulate than silence, and more colorful than respectability."


December 18, 2000

Morris

"In trying to recapture a turning point in one's life at such an age, it is almost impossible to ascribe tangible motives to some great change in one's direction, to isolate a thought, or a decision. But there are a handful of things that stand out so clearly that they become, after many years, almost symbol. They embody in retrospect the very substance of one's existence at a given moment. They may be fleeting recollections, chance encounters, the thread of an old thought, but they are revealing in themselves, and they become more than memory."


December 18, 2000

Morris

"But as a boy gets older, unless he has special inner resources, or a tailbone made of sheet-iron, or unless he gets saved by Billy Graham at twilight in a football stadium, the simple small-town faith starts wearing thin. One cannot move along at a crisp rate on a steady diet of salvation."


December 18, 2000

Morris

"As a boy Richard Wright lived on a tenant farm not far from the town. Once, many years later, when I was full grown and twenty-two, I found myself in Paris; I got Wright's phone number and called him, saying I was a white Yazoo boy. "You're from Yazoo?" he asked. "Well, come on over." We went out to an Arab bar and got a little drunk together, and talked about the place we both had known. I asked him, "Will you ever come back to America?" "No," he said. "I want my children to grow up as human beings." After a time a silence fell between us, like an immense pain-- or maybe it was my imagining."


December 18, 2000

Marquis de Sade

"The second reason for abolishing the death penalty is that it has never prevented crime, for crimes are committed every day at the foot of the scaffold. This penalty should be eliminated, in a word, because there is no calculation more erroneous than that involved in putting one man to death for killing another, since the obvious result of the procedure is that instead of one man less, there are suddenly two, and such arithmetic can be familiar only to executioners and imbeciles."
Donatien Aldonse Francois, Marquis de Sade
December 14, 2000

Comte de Sade

"Yet still it is better to be miserable in Paris than happy in the Provinces, and they are right who say that Paris will not make you happy but will prevent you from being happy anywhere else."
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Francois, Comte de Sade
November 19, 2000

Renault

"I imagine war is about the most potent escape from the problems of its own solitude that the human ego has ever thought up."


October 14, 2000

Renault

"Guilt isn't just sin. That would be simple. Guilt is being responsible for the consequences."


October 14, 2000

Allende

"There are all kinds of stories. Some are born with the telling, their substance is language, and before someone puts them into words they are but a hint of an emotion, a caprice of mind, an image, or an intangible recollection. Others are manifest whole, like an apple, and can be repeated, infinitely without risk of altering their meaning. Some are taken from reality and processed through inspiration and become real after being told. And then there are the secret stories that remain hidden in the shadows of the mind; they are like living organisms, they grow roots and tentacles, they become covered with excrescences and parasites, and with time are transformed into the matter of nightmares. To exorcise the demons of memory, it is sometimes necessary to tell them as a story."


September 25, 2000

Haynes

"Brief. Girlhood is brief. Summer is brief. Love is brief. Life is brief."


August 27, 2000

Haynes

"Said I had the makings of being a perfect Catholic what with my preoccupation with guilt coupled with my lack of motivation to do anything about it."


August 28, 2000

Haynes

"Ain't it a shame the body can't go where the heart lives."


August 27, 2000

Haynes

"Most all women need airing out. Heavy thoughts kept inn's about as bad a thing as a too-tight dress and not gettin' enough air to the behind."

>
August 28, 2000

Haynes

"I was married once and it was one time too many, and if bein' a queenboy's what it takes to rid women of their ways, then I say all men best bend over and get on with it."


August 27, 2000

Haynes

"Damn Milton, and his father before him.
What did his father do?
"Most of the damage, probably. Gave him a classical education and brought him up respectable. God, to think what he might have produced if he'd knocked around like Shakespeare did, instead of sitting indoors ruining his eyesight and thinking up filthy words like connubial and affable, and, congratulant. I suppose when they were fresh, all the writers in the country must have gulped them down like unspoiled savages getting their first taste of gin. Now we're sodden with 'em and all the rest of his fancy diseases. He can afford them; he's never less than archangel ruined, blast him. But he's left the English tongue like Satan left Adam, and Eve-- fig -leafed and self-conscious."


August 27, 2000

Haynes

"Plays proving a hard truth that unwittingly man is both innocent and guilty simultaneously, and more often than not, winds up as a knob because of it."


August 27, 2000

Haynes

"He especially loved the old philosophers-- their keen awareness of human worth and a belief in what a human could accomplish, both good and bad. And he loved the tragic poets-- Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Canaan had no clue as to the proper saying of their names. The way they twisted coming out his mouth was as unimportant to him as the true color of his colon."


August 27, 2000

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