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.