Emily Bronte

The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!

Molière

Je dis que l’on doit faire ainsi

Qu’au jeu de dés

Où s’il ne vous vient pas

Ce que vous demandez

Il faut jouer d’adresse, et,

D’une âme réduite

Corriger le hasard

Par la bonne conduite

Dostoyevski

Au contact des enfants l’âme s’assainit

Iris Murdock

"Quantum physics is the language of nature,” said Midge.

“Who says so”, said Thomas.

“I do.  I heard It on TV.  And the subatomic world needs us to rescue it from chaos.  It all sounds perfectly mad.  No wonder there are terrorists.  No wonder we need religion."

Lewis Carroll

Don’t let him know she liked them best

For this must ever be

A secret kept from all the rest

Between yourself and me

Alan Watts

In the western world it is second nature for us to assume that all creative action requires the incentive of inadequacy and discontent. It seems obvious that if we felt fulfilled at each instant and no longer regarded time as a path of pursuit, we should sit down in the sun, pull large Mexican hats over our eyes, and put bottles of tequila at our elbows. Even if this were true it might not be so great a disaster as we imagine, for there is no doubt that our extreme busyness is as much nervous fidgets as industry, and that a certain amount of ordinary laziness would lend our culture the pleasant mellowness it singularly lacks. However, it does not seem to occer to us that action goaded by a sense of inadequacy will be creative onlly in a limited sense. It will express the emptiness from which it springs rather than fullness, hunger rather than strength.

Flaubert

Il fréquenta le monde, et il eut d’autres amours encore.  Mais le souvenir continuel du premier les lui rendait insipides; et puis la véhémence du désir, la fleur même de la sensation était perdue.  Ses ambitions d’ésprit avaient également diminuées.  Des années passèrent ; et il supportait le désoeuvrement de son intelligence et l’inertie de son coeur.

Van Gogh

Art ...always seeking without absolutely finding.  As far as I know, that word means: I am seeking, I am striving, I am in with all my heart. It is just the contrary from saying, I know it, I have found it

Salmon Rushdie

Morality, judgement, character...it all starts with memory...and I am keeping carbons.

Lao Tzu

Man when living is soft and tender; when dead he is hard and tough. All animals and plants are tender and fragile; when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and the tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life.

Alan Watts

To act or grow creatively we must begin from where we are, but we cannot begin at all if we are not “all here” without reservation or regret.  Lacking self-acceptance we are always at odds with our point of departure, always doubting the ground on which we stand, always so divided against ourselves that we cannot act with sincerity.  Apart from self-acceptance as the groundwork of thought and action, every attempt at spiritual or moral discipline is the fruitless struggle of a mind that is split asunder and insincere.  It is the freedom which is the essential basis of self-restraint.

Michael Ignatieff / Shakespeare

Lovers know what social scientists sometimes fail to understand:  everyone is an individual before and after he or she is a member of a race, a class, or a profession, and that these differences, so tiny that they can only be seen in the minute mutual scrutiny of a bedroom are the source of the identity that is primary for a person… In love we want to banish father and mother as fully as we can, if only to banish the Oedipal taboos that linger and bleach away desire.

… it becomes an essential activity of the intelligence to safeguard the meaning of the romantic tradition (the integrity of love poetry, for example) so that our children can still grow up hearing the dream speaking from its source, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31, with its sublimely wise vision of love based not on flight from the shades of the past but on finding a home for the past in the loves of the present:

Thou art the grave where buried love doth live
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone
Who all their parts of me to thee did give
That due of many now is thine alone.
Their images I loved I view in thee
And thou, all they, has all the all of me

Oscar Wilde

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

Oscar Wilde

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

Mario Vargas Llosa

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Marguerite Yourcenar

certains voeux avaient été repoussés, d’autres exaucés au contraire, car le malheur est que, parfois, des souhaits s’accomplissent, afin que se perpetue le supplice de l’espérance.

William Blake

In seed time learn, in harvest teach,
in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plow
over the bones of the dead

The road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid
courted by Incapacity.

He who desires but acts not
breeds pestilence.

The cut worm forgives the p low

Dip him in the river who loves water.

A fool sees not the same tree
that a wise man sees.

He whose face gives no light,
shall never become a star.

Eternity is in love
with the productions of time.

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock;
but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

All wholesome food is caught
without a net or a trap.

Bring out number, weight and measure
in a year of dearth.

No bird soars too high if he soars
with his own wings.

A dead body revenges not injuries.

The most sublime act is to set
another before you.

If the fool would persist in his
folly, he would become wise.

Folly is the cloke of knavery.

Shame is Pride’s cloke.

Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion.

The pride of the peacock is
the glory of God.

The wrath of the lion is the
wisdom of god.

The nakedness of woman is the
work of God.

Excess of sorrow laughs
excess of joy weeps.

The roaring of lions, the howling of
wolves, the raging of the stormy
sea, and the destructive sward,
are portions of eternity, too great
for the eye of man.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself

Joys impregnate, Sorrows bring forth,

Let man wear the fell of the lion,
woman the fleece of the sheep.

The bird a nest, the spider a web,
man friendship

George Orwell

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning clear as one can through pictures or sensations.

André Gide

Tout au contraire de nous, Albert, non tant en moraliste qu’en romantique et de cette génération qui se reconnaissait en Rolla, ne consentait à considérer la volupté que comme une récompense de l’amour, et tenait le simple plaisir en mépris. Pour moi j’ai dit déjà combien l’événément à la fois et la pente de ma nature m’invitait à dissocier l’amour du désir

André Gide

chaque respect, dis-je, comportant un aveuglement, c’est seulement en s’affranchissant de ceux-ci que l’homme pouvait espérer de progresser vers la lumière.

e.e. cummings

Since feeling is first
Who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you
Wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
Lady I swear by all flower. Don’t cry
the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids flutter which ways
We are for each other – than laugh
lean back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis.

André Gide

On a peur de se trouver seul ! on ne se trouve pas du tout.  Cette agoraphobie morale m’est odieuse; c’est la pire des lâchetés. Pourtant c’est toujours seul qu’on invente. Mais qui cherche ici d’inventer ? Ce que l’on sent en soi de différent, c’est précisément ce que l’on possède de rare, ce qui fait à chacun sa valeur ; et c’est là ce que l’on tâche de supprimer. On imite.  Et l’on prétend aimer la vie.

Milan Kundera

le temps épéronné par la jalousie passe à une allure incroyable. La jalousie occupe l’esprit encore plus complètement qu’un travail intellectuel passioné. L’esprit n’a plus une seconde de loisir. Celui qui est en proie à la jalousie ignore l’ennui. 

William Blake

I Dreamt a Dream! What can it mean?

And that I was a maiden Queen

Guarded by an angel mild:

Witless woe was ne’er beguil’d!

 

And I wept both night and day

And he wip’d my tears away

And I wept both day and night

And hid from him my heart’s delight

 

So he took his wings and fled;

Then the morn blush’d rosy red;

I dried my tears and armed my fears

With ten thousand shields and spears.

 

Soon my Angel came again:

I was armed, he came in vain;

For the time of youth was fled,

And grey hairs were on my head

Milan Kundera

Freedom does not begin when parents are rejected or buried; freedom dies when parents are born.

Milan Kundera

Alexandre Dubcek, après avoir été arrêté par l’armée russe, kidnappé, emprisonné, menacé, contraint de négocier avec Brejnev, rentre à Prague. Il parle à la radio, mais il ne peut parler, il cherche son souffle, il fait au milieu des phrases de longues pauses atroces. Ce que révèle pour moi cet épisode historique (d’ailleurs complétement oublié car, deux heures après, les techniciens de la radio ont été obligés de couper les pénibles pauses de son discours), c’est la faiblesse. La faiblesse comme catégorie très générale de l’existence : « on est toujours faible confronté à une force supérieure ; même quand on a le corps d’athlète de Dubcek. » Tereza ne peut supporter le spectacle de cette faiblesse qui lui répugne et l’humilie et elle préfère émigrer.  Mais face aux infidélités de Thomas, elle est comme Dubcek en face de Brejnev : désarmée et faible.  Et vous savez déjà ce qu’est le vertige : c’est être ivre de sa propre faiblesse, c’est le désir insurmontable de tomber.  Tereza subitement comprend qu’ « elle fait partie des faibles, du camp des faibles, du pays des faibles et qu’elle doit leur être fidèle justement parce qu’ils sont faibles et qu’ils cherchent leur souffle au milieu des phrases. » Et, ivre de sa faiblesse, elle quitte Tomas et revient à Prague, dans la « villes des faibles ».  La situation historique n’est pas ici un arrière-plan, un décor devant lequel les situations humaines se déroulent, mais est en elle-même une situation humaine, une situation existentielle en agrandissement.

-l'Art du roman

Milan Kundera

La tendresse prend naissance à l’instant où nous sommes rejetés sur le seuil de l’âge adulte et où nous nous rendons comte avec angoisse des avantages de l’enfance que nous ne comprenions pas quand nous étions enfants.

 

La tendresse, c’est créer un espace artificiel où l’autre doit être traité comme un enfant.

Proust

Il faudrait choisir de cesser de souffrir ou de cesser d’aimer. Car, ainsi qu’au début il est formé par le désir, l’amour n’est entretenu plus tard que par l’anxieté douloureuse.  Je sentais qu’une partie de la vie d’Albertine m’echappait. L’amour, dans l’anxieté douloureuse comme dans le désir heureux, est l’exigence d’un tout. Il ne naît, il ne subsiste que si une partie reste à conquérir. On n’aime que ce qu’on ne possède pas tout entier.

Eudora Welty

But he wanted to leap up, so say to her, I have been sick and I found out then, only then, how lonely I am.  Is it too late?  My heart puts up a struggle inside me, and you may have heard it, protesting against emptiness… It should be full, he would rush on to tell her, thinking of his heart now as a deep lake, it should be holding love like other hearts.  It should be flooded with love.  There would be a warm Spring day… Come and stand in my heart, whoever you are, and a whole river would cover your feet and rise higher and take your knees in whirlpools, and draw you down to yourself, your whole body, your heart too.

Durkheim

Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible arise within him.

Henry James

He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them that was worthy – to call worthy – of the personal relation; never any charming charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed.  He might vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them; he might humorously have put it that one had never, as by the higher conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare insidiously the cup.  These were services that by all romantic tradition were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate.  But he could amuse himself with saying – so far as the amusement went – that they were what he had once for all turned his back on.

Emerson

A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle.  They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade.  In the sun it will mark the hour.  Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.

Marguerite Yourcenar

chaque homme a éternellement à choisir, au cours de sa vie brève, entre l’espoir infatigable et la sage absence d’espérance, entre les délices du chaos et celles de la stabilité, entre le Titan et L’Olympien. A choisir entre eux, ou à réussir à les accorder un jour l’un à l’autre.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Notre grande erreur est d’essayer d’obtenir de chacun en particulier les vertus qu’il n’a pas, et de négliger de cultiver celles qu’il possède.

Marguerite Yourcenar

La lettre écrite m’a enseigné à écouter la voix humaine, tout comme les grandes attitudes immobiles des statues m’ont appris à apprécier les gestes. Par contre, et dans la suite, la vie m’a éclairci les livres.

Proust

Il admirait la terrible puissance recréatrice de sa mémoire. Ce n’est que de l’affaiblissement de cette génératrice dont la fécondité diminue avec l’âge qu’il pouvait espérer un apaisement à sa torture.

Annie Leclerc

L’homme ne se concevrait-il comme sexué, sexuel, donc homme véritable, que lorsqu’il est en érection ?


Tout se passe comme si l’homme manquait d’une représentation de lui-même qui intègre de façon permanente et continue sa sexualité…


Il semble qu’il ait tout fait pour effacer, ensevelir l’image flottante et indécise de lui-même qui l’empêche de se reconnaître comme sexué, comme particulièrement homme, tant que son sexe n’est pas en activité, et n’ait pu réussir à l’oublier définitivement qu’en la recouvrant de l’exigence d’un devoir-être, où les fins à atteindre miment à un autre niveau ce qu’il perçoit de lui au moment de l’érection.


Bref, comme si l’homme, ne se sentant que brièvement sexuel, et par là incertainement sexué, s’imposait par des moyens détournés de l’être à temps complet. D’où la volonté de pratiquer un certain nombre de vertus qui paradoxalement seraient le propre de l’homme, et permettraient en retour de le définir

Proust

Comme tous ceux qui possèdent une chose, pour savoir ce qui arriverait s’il cessait un moment de la posséder, il avait ôté cette chose de son esprit, en y laissant tout le reste dans le même état que quand elle était là. Or l’absence d’une chose, ce n’est pas que cela, ce n’est pas un simple manque partiel, c’est un bouleversement de tout le reste, c’est un état nouveau qu’on ne peut prévoir dans l’ancien.

James Joyce

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:


--A day of dappled seaborne clouds.


The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue; sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours; it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colours? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

James Joyce

He wanted to meet in the real world the insubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.

André Gide

ne cherche pas, dans l'avenir, à retrouver jamais le passé. Saisis de chaque instant la nouveauté irremplaçable et ne prépare pas tes joies, ou sache qu'en son lieu préparé te surprendra une joie autre.

Que n'as tu pas compris que tout bonheur est de rencontrer et se présenter à toi dans chaque instant comme un mendiant sur ta route. Malheur à toi si tu dis que ton bonheur est mort parce que tu n'avais pas rêvé pareil à cela ton bonheur - et que tu ne l'admets que conforme à tes principes et à tes voux.

André Gide

c’est par peur d’une perte d’amour que parfois j’ai pu sympathiser avec des tristesses, des ennuis, des douleurs que sinon, je n’aurais qu’à peine endurés. Laisse à chacun le soin de sa vie.

Everything But the Girl

Something has come between me and the world that knew 
what I thought would last is falling apart in the face of something new 
how can I explain that I had no choice
the sound of the waves fills her ears and drowns out my voice 
and I'm just too far away for her to believe what I say 
she couldn't hear me, she wouldn't listen anyway

How can I write a letter the post is so slow
if I'm to disappoint her then that's something she ought to know 
I can just hear her voice fall as I wait here alone
how can so much harm be done by just two minutes spent on the phone 
you say that things will get better
but she would hate me if I let her
and she reads so much in every word that I say

I thought that being apart would just bring us some variety
but after some time it seems clear that she's changed in a different way from 
me 
and I would like to shout at someone but no one's to blame
it's just her it's just me and everything that is 
just not the same
sometimes I would turn back the clock 
and recapture all that we've lost 
but I couldn't give up all that we have today

Iris Murdock

to know clearly what you surrender, what you gain, and to have no regrets, to revisit without envy the scenes of a surrendered joy, and to taste it ephemerally once more, with a delight undimmed by the knowledge that it is momentary, that is happiness, that surely is freedom.

William H. Gass

Children collect nouns, bugs, bottle caps, seashells, verbs: what’s that?  What’s it doing now?  Who’s this? And with the greed which rushes through them like rain down gulleys, they immediately grasp the prepositions of belonging and the pronouns of possessions.  But how often do they ask how cold it is, what color, how loud, rare, warm, responsive, kin, how soft, how wet, how noxious, loving, indisreet, how sour?

Milan Kundera

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

E. M. Forster

Man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself.  He cannot be bored about psychology.  He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam engine.  He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul.

Cicero

Haec est nunc vita mea: saluto bonos veros qui ad me veniunt; deinde aut scriba aut lego; post haec omne tempus corpori datur

Cicero

Numquam enim temeritas cum sapientia commiscetur.

Publilius Syrus

Amor misceri cum timore non potest.

Horace

Qui coepit, dimidium facti habet. Incipe!

Jean Philippe Toussaint

Assis sur le rebord de la baignoire, j’expliquais à Edmondsson qu’il n’était peut-être pas très sain, à vingt-sept ans, bientôt vingt-neuf, de vivre plus ou moins reclus dans une baignoire. Je devais prendre un risque, disais-je les yeux baisse, en caressant l’émail de la baignoire, le risque de compromettre la quiétude de ma vie abstraite pour. Je ne terminais pas la phrase.

Saul Bellow

There was no stain in the water, where schools of minnows swam.  Herzog sighed and said to himself “Praise God... praise God.”  His breathing had become freer.  His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colours; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines.  Never still.  If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him.  But that would be too simple.  But that would be too childish.  The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry.  A vast human action is going on.  Death watches.  So if you have some happiness, conceal it.  And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.

Lech Walesa

Figurez-vous trois boulangeries.  L’une privée, l’autre d’Etat et la troisième relevant au kolkhoze.  Celle qui cuit le meilleur pain est socialiste!

Iris Murdock

...shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the world... Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured at the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts are gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny little things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I will think of one tomorrow.

Heinrich Böll

Politeness is really the most effective form of contempt.

Iris Murdock

There’s nothing like a woman’s doing you an injury for making her incensed against you.

Colin Wilson

The problem for the civilization is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as objectively as last Sunday’s newspapers. But the problem for the individual will always be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider.

Cynthia Ozick

what was missing in the glory that was Greece was metaphor… You will say, What? A nation of myth and you claim it has no metaphor? Aren’t myths the greatest metaphors of all?… how humanly resplendent: each god represents an aspect of human passion. Here is beauty, here is lust, here is wisdom, here is chance, here is courage, here is mendacity, here is war, and so on and so on. Isn’t that metaphoric enough for you?

“Observe: there is no god or goddess who stands for the still small voice of conscience.”

Lev. 24:22 “You shall have one manner of law, the same for the stranger as for the home-born.” …this precept of loving the stranger appears 36 times in the Pentateuch. It is there because a moral connection has been made with the memory of bondage… Without the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other…

In the absence of this metaphoric capability, what are the consequences? Nowhere beyond the reach of the Pentateuch did the alien and the home-born live under the same code. The Romans originally had a single word, hostis, to signify both enemy and stranger, in early Roman law, every alien was classed as an enemy, devoid of rights. In Germanic law the alien was rechtsunfahig, a pariah with no access to justice. The Greeks made slaves of the stranger and then taunted him with barks. There have been and still are, religio-political systems that have incorporated the teaching of contempt, turning the closest neighbors into the most despised strangers – a loathing expressed in words like, “untouchable”, dhimmi,” “diecide”. In our own country, slavery thrived under the wing of a freedom-proclaiming Constitution… And in 1945, a British camera on a single day in a single German deathcamp just liberated photographed a bulldozer sweeping into five pits 5,000 starved and abused human corpses at a time, a thousand to a pit, all of them having been judged unfit for the right to live.

Henry James

She had never met a person having less of that fault which is the principle obstacle to friendship - the air of reproducing the more tiresome, the stale, the too-familiar parts of one’s own character.

Henry James

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see - that’s my idea of happiness.

William H. Gass

If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we’d never long for another, never wander away: where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood? Who else would robe us so richly, take us to the best places, or guard our virtue as his own and defend our character in every situation? If we were his sentences we’d sing ourselves though we were dying and about to be extinguished, since the silence which would follow our passing would not be like the pause left behind by a noisy train. It would be a memorial, well marked grave, just as the Master has assured us death itself is: the distinguished thing.

Albert Camus

When I was young, I expected people to give me more than they could - continuous friendship, permanent emotion. Now I have learned to expect less than they can give - a silent companionship. And their emotions, their friendship and noble gestures keep their full miraculous value in my eyes; wholly the fruit of grace.

John Berger

Passion begins with a sense of the uniqueness, the solitude, the vulnerability of the loved one in a harshly different world.  Or, to put this in an active rather than a passive mood, it begins with the loved one's impudence, defiance, promise of an alternative.  In an unfeeling world such a promise becomes a well in a desert.  None of this exists in Renoir's world because there are no contrasts and no edges.  Everything has been dressed by the art of painting.

Blaise Pascal

Tout le mal vient à l’homme du fait qu’il ne peut rester tranquille dans une chambre

E.M. Forster

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks.  Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe.  It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle.  It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

Colin Wilson

Nothing is indescribable in words if you take the time and the trouble. If your present language framework is inadequate, then you must carefully create a larger one

Noah Webster

It is difficult to comprehend his meaning and the chain of his ideas, as fast as we naturally read… The mind of the reader is constantly dazzled by a glare of ornament, or charmed from the subject by the music of the language. (on Edward Gibbon)

Richard Bach

You teach best what you most need to learn

Frederick Turner

We have a nature, that nature is cultural, that culture is classical

Theodore Roethke

My lizard, my lively writher
May your limbs never wither
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy's mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
May your hair ever blaze
In the sun, in the sun
When I am undone
When I am no one.

Milan Kundera

Litost is a Czech word with no exact translation into any other language. It designates a feeling as infinite as an open accordion, a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse, and an indefinable longing. The first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog.

Under certain circumstances, however, it can have a very narrow meaning, a meaning as definite, precise, and sharp as a well-honed cutting edge. I have never found an equivalent in other languages for this sense of the word either, though I do not see how anyone can understand the human soul without it.

Let me give an example. One day the student went swimming with his girlfriend. She was a top-notch athlete; he could barely keep afloat. He had trouble holding his breath underwater, and was forced to thrash his way forward, jerking his head back and forth above the surface. The girl was crazy about him and tactfully kept to his speed. But as their swim was coming to an end, she felt the need to give her sporting instincts free rein, and sprinted to the other shore. The student tried to pick up his tempo too, but swallowed many mouthfuls of water. He felt humiliated, exposed for the weakling he was, he felt the resentment, the special sorrow which can only be called litost. He recalled his sickly childhood – no physical exercise, no friends, nothing but Mama’s ever watchful eye – and sank into utter, all-encompassing despair. On their way back to the city they took a shortcut through the fields. He did not say a word. He was wounded, crestfallen; he felt an irresistible desire to beat her. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked him, and he went into a tirade about how the undertow on the other side of the river was very dangerous and he told her not to swim over there and she could have drowned – then he slapped her face. The girl burst out crying, and when he saw the tears running down her face, he took pity on her and put his arms around her, and his litost.

Anaïs Nin

It is not similarities that create harmony, but the art of infusing various elements that enrich life. Professional activities tend to demand almost too much concentration; this becomes a narrowing of experience for each one. The infusion of new currents of thoughts, stretching the range of interests is beneficial to both men and women

Ann Beattie

Bad enough that one song, or two songs, could break your heart – she had to make the mistake of falling in love with somebody who was addicted to all of it.  It was like falling in love with someone and having it be your own special secret that the sun went down at night. 

Hermann Hesse

You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend.  You should not take old people who are already dead seriously.  It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously.  We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time.  It consists, I don’t mind telling you, in confidence, in putting too high a value on time.  I, too, once put too high a value on time.  For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

André Gide

un sentiment très neuf se fit jour… C’était pour la première fois la conscience de ma valeur propre ; ce qui me séparait, me distinguait des autres, importait, ce que personne d’autre que moi me disait ni ne pouvait dire, c’était ce que j’avais à dire

Samuel Beckett

Le point noir que j'étais dans la pâle immensité des sables, comment lui vouloir du mal? On s'en approchait, oui, pour voir ce que c'était, si ce n'était pas un objet de valeur, provenant d'un naufrage et rejeté par la tempête. Mais en voyant que l'épave vivait, convenablement quoique pauvrement vêtue, on s'en détournait. De vieilles femmes, des jeunes aussi ma foi, venues là pour ramasser du bois, s'excitaient à ma vue, les premiers temps. Mais c'était toujours les mêmes et j'avais beau changer de place, elles finirent toutes par savoir ce que j'étais et elles gardaient leurs distances. Je crois que l'une d'elles un jour, se détachant de ses compagnes, vint m'offrir à manger et que je la regardai sans répondre, jusqu'à ce qu'elle se retirât. Oui, il me semble qu'il se produisit à cette époque un incident quelconque dans ce genre, mais je confonds peut-être avec un autre séjour, antérieur car ce sera celui mon dernier, mon avant dernier, au bord de la mer. Quoi qu'il en soit je vois une femme qui, tout en venant vers moi, s'arrête de temps en temps et se retourne vers ses compagnes. Serrées comme des brebis elles la regardent s'éloigner et lui font des signes d'encouragement, en riant sans doute, car je crois entendre rire, au loin. Puis je la vois de dos, elle rebrousse chemin, et c'est maintenant vers moi qu'elle se retourne, mais sans s'arrêter. Mais je fonds peut-être en une seule deux occasions, et deux femmes, l'une qui vient vers moi, timidement, suivie des cris et des rires de ces compagnes, et l'autre qui s'éloigne, d'un pas plutôt décidé.

Samuel Beckett

For there seemed to be two ways of behaving in the presence of wishes, the active and the contemplative, and though they both give the same result, it was the latter I preferred, matter of temperament I presume.

Samuel Beckett

Je me mis à jouer avec les cris un peu comme j'avais joué avec la chanson, m'avançant, m'arrêtant, m'avançant, m'arrêtant, si l'on peut appeler cela jouer. Tant que je marchais je ne les entendais pas, grâce aux bruits de mes pas. Mais sitôt arrêté je les entendais à nouveau, chaque fois plus faibles certes, mais qu'est-ce que cela peut faire qu'une cri soit faible au fort? Ce qu'il faut , c'est qu'il s'arrête. Pendant des années j'ai cru qu'ils allaient s'arrêter. Maintenant je ne le crois plus. Il m'aurait fallu d'autres amours, peut-être. Mais l'amour, cela ne se commande pas.

William Irwin Thompson

The liberal vision... is the vision of management: time can be managed, space can be managed, and even, with appropriate temple rites, God can be managed.

Emerson

True fortitude of understanding consists in not letting what we know to be embarrassed by what we don't know.

Herbert Spencer

There is a principle which is proof against all information, which is proof against all arguments, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance; that principle is contempt, prior to investigation.

Nabokov

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs rely.

William Irwin Thompson

If the organism develops before it encounters its environment, then it meets the environment on its own terms.

George William Russell

All passionate conflicts result in the interchange of characteristics. 

Gospel of Thomas

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male be not male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness, then you will enter the Kingdom.

Mark Twain

If you tell the truth, you never have to remember anything.

William H. Gass

One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup...

That space in paper sacks which are too small to be re-used is blue. Sucking stones, too.  Even if the sacks themselves are often tan and sandy, the stones are ovals of grey – blue granite.  Molloy’s sentences of calculation, so calm, so formed, so desperate, are blue to the pale core they contain, and at the bottom of the paper bags, as if waterlogged, there is always a little slip with the price of purchase.  The pockets of the great coat and the pockets of the trousers, the tireless fist which is at itch to trade one for another, are blue like the empty sacks they resemble.  The loneliness of clothes draped over the backs of chairs is blue, undies, empty lobbies, rumpled spreads are blue, especially when chenille and if orange; not body warmth or body smell or the acidulous salts of the vagina – no – blue belongs to the past – to the minutes after masturbation, to thought, to detachment and removal, fading, to the inside side of sex and the self that in the midst of pitch and toss has slipped away like a lucky penny fallen from a dresser.

Benjamin Demott

The crux of the indictment is the assertion that Christ cruelly overestimated the intelligence of ordinary humankind.  Christ’s promise of a truth that would set us free, free of material desire, tribal idols, conventional wisdom pragmatic realism – is too demanding and therefore intolerable.  No craving is stronger in us than the craving for the loss of individuality.  We seek disappearance into the herd and no wish is less controllable in us than our wish for dependence.

From "Mobile Souls - The Brothers Karamozov Maps a Multitude of Transfigurations"

Rebecca Goldstein

Variation in outward focus is itself a function of the nature of the given discipline… The degree of outward focus is in inverse proportion to the degree of certainty attainable within the given methodology.  The greater the certainty of one’s results, the less the concern with other’s opinions of oneself.

Niels Bohr

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.  But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Emerson

I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.  I would write on the lintel of the doorpost, Whim.  I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

Oscar Wilde

So my too stormy passions work me wrong,
For excess of Love my Love is dumb

But surely unto thee mine eyes did show

Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;

Else it were better we should part and go,

Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,

And I to nurse the barren memory

Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like.

Emily Dickinson

If you were coming in the fall,

I'd brush the summer by

With half a smile and half a spurn,

As housewives do a fly.

 

If I could see you in a year,

I'd wind the months in balls,

And put them each in separate drawers,

Until their time befalls.

 

If only centuries delayed,

I'd count them on my hand,

Subtracting till my fingers dropped

Into Van Diemen's land.

 

If certain, when this life was out,

That yours and mine should be,

I'd toss it yonder like a rind,

And taste eternity.

 

But now, all ignorant of the length

Of time's uncertain wing,

It goads me, like the goblin bee,

That will not state its sting.

Joan Armatrading

Mistaken shyness can be costly

Saint Exupéry

C'est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante

Thomas Hardy

When they talked on an indifferent subject, as now, there was ever a second silent conversation passing between their emotions, so perfect was the reciprocity between them.

Thomas Hardy

Wifedom has not yet squashed up and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no further individuality.

Paul Horgan

Of course it’s dangerous… There is something dangerous about all beauty, and it is still beautiful!  

After the great gift of life itself, it was the finest gift she made me, this means of losing fear.

I was moved in formless sorrow for what people knew, and were, and did, beyond the boundaries of my certain knowledge.

Joan Armatrading

like a moth

with no flame

to persuade me

like blood in the rain…

running thin

while you stand on the inside

looking in

save me

 

inside looking in

complete in yourself

throw me a lifeline

save me

Emily Dickinson

I hide myself within my flower,
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too -
And angels know the rest

I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness.

Rickie Lee Jones

But after all

There are such things

And these are the things

Who'll turn your memories back into dreams again

Oh, it's all flying and waving

For you to keep trying

You're so close.

So close.

William H. Gass

Without words, what can be well and richly remembered?  Yesterdays disappear like drying mist... 

unformed feelings lack impact, just as unfelt ideas lose weight.  So walk around unrewritten, if you like.  Live on broken phrases and syllable gristle, telegraphese and film reviews.  No one will suspect until you speak, and your soul falls out of your mouth like a can of corn from a shelf.

La Rochefoucauld

L’esprit ne saurait jouer longtemps le personnage du cœur.

Sappho

For if she flees, she shall not pursue; and if

she receives not gifts, yet shall she give, and if

she loves not, she shall soon love even against her will

 

Come to me now also, and deliver me from cruel anxieties, fulfill all that my heart desires to fulfill, and be yourself my comrade-in-arms.

Simone de Beauvoir

"Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat, in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality becomes mutuality." 

Dostoevski

I was walking along and singing, for when I am happy I always hum some tune to myself like every happy man who has neither friends nor good acquaintances, and who has no one to share his joy with in a moment of happiness