Jean Jacques Rousseau

Only passion can elevate the soul to do great things.

Elizabeth Smart

Vanity is a vital aid to nature: completely and absolutely necessary to life. It is one of nature's ways to bind you to the earth.

Lillian Smith

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

Philip Larkin

Until I grew up, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I
realized it was just children I didn't like. Once you started meeting
grown-ups life was much pleasanter. Children are very horrible, aren't
they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.

Leonard Cohen

I WROTE FOR LOVE

I wrote for love

Then I wrote for money.

With someone like me

it's the same thing.

1975

Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Bobby Kennedy

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

William Langewieshe in Vanity Fair

People who criticize Rumsfeld for having miscalculated the numbers have got it wrong. On the one hand, we had more than enough troops to defeat Saddam's army. On the other hand, it's inconceivable that we could have ever had enough troops, at any troop level, to deal with the wakelessness problem in Iraq. You can double, you can triple the number of troops. If you permanently stationed soldiers on every street corner, I suppose that would probably have an effect, but it's inconceivable that we could do this. We saw the same problem in Vietnam. We kept increasing the troop levels, thinking that this would do the trick. The high troop levels probably did slow the defeat that occurred, but it did not affect the ultimate outcome of the war. This is an aspect of fighting guerrilla wars that many Americans seem not to understand. And they need to understand it. There will be times when we will need to intervene in guerrilla wars around the world for our own national interest, but we need to be very aware of the tools we have to work with. There is no point in bringing the wrong tool to a problem. You bring some other tools.

Thorne Anderson, Photographer

I don't know many people who do the work that I do that like the term, war correspondent. From an outsiders point of view that's what I do, but for me, my work is not all about war. ... It's really about what life is like at the Frontiers of American foreign policy. Unfortunately that means it's a war book in today's time, but really I try to report on the human condition. I'm not so interested in just following the heat of battle, in fact I really hate it. I'm not sure what it means to be an adrenaline junkie. I get in very tense situations where I'm been flooded with adrenaline. It can be very dangerous under gun-fire. I've been attacked by crowds of angry people. There's a lot of times when you're facing flight or fight. I don't like it, I actually hate it, I prefer to be calm and collected and observe what's going on around me. When I hear people talk about American Foreign policy in easy and highly sanitised terms, I feel privileged to have a perspective that allows me to cut through that bullshit.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

There is no writer so bad that some critic will not call him great.

Martha Gellhorn

You must not only know how to write. But you have to be privately, personally, sound to the core. Not sane, but sound. If not, it always shows. Slight smell of cheese in the air, and the work gets a limp, rotting, glazed look.

Isaak Babel

If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned, not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth -- that there is nothing in the world that is terrible. He had learned tht, as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and not free. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

People have called this kind of war 'guerrilla warfare' and assume that by so calling it they have explained its meaning. But such a war does not fit in under any rule and is directly opposed to a well-known rule of tactics whcih is accepted as infaillible. That rule says that an attacker should concentrate his forces in order to be stronger than his opponent and the moment of conflict.

Guerilla war (always successful, as history show) directly infringes that rule.

Paul Desmond on writing

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

Paul Desmond, Various hilarities

[Paul Desmond played alto with Brubeck and is/was famous for his wit.]

"I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was."

"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini."

Of Vogue fashion models, he said, "Sometimes they go around with guys who are scuffling -- for a while. But usually they end up marrying some cat with a factory. This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker."

"Sometimes I get the feeling that there are orgies going on all over new
York City, and somebody says, `Let's call Desmond,' and somebody else says,
'Why bother? He's probably home reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.'"

His response to the annoying banality of an interviewer, "You're beginning to sound like a cross between David Frost and David Susskind, and that is a cross I cannot bear."

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Although men are not normally aware of it, they must believe that they are something more than they are in order to be capable of being what they are; they need to feel this something more above and around them, and there are times when they suddenly miss it.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

It was an intelligent country, it housed cultivated people who, like cultivated people all over the globe, ran around in an unsettled state of mind amid a tremendous whirl of noise, speed, innovation, conflict, and whatever goes to make up the optical-acoustical landscape of our lives; like everybody else, they read and heard every day dozens of news items that made their hair stand on end, and were willing to work themselves up over them, even to intervene, but they never got around to it because a few minutes afterward the stimulus had already been displaced in their minds by more recent ones; like everyone else, they felt surrounded by murder, killings, passion, self-sacrifice, and greatness, all somehow going on withint the Gordian knot that was forming around them, but they could never break through to these adventures because they were trapped in an office or somewhere, at work, and by evening when they were free, their unresolved tensions exploded into forms of relaxation that failed to relax them. … They no longer knew what their smiles, their sighs, their ideas, were for. What exactly was the point of their thoughts, their smiles?

Martha Gellhorn

"Our President is a disaster and will get worse; never trust a Texan farther than you can throw a rhino."

Martha Gellhorn on Lyndon Johnson

Chris Hedges, Interview with Bill Moyers 2003

MOYERS: Three times when you were in El Salvador you were threatened with death. You received death threats. The Embassy got you out.

HEDGES: That's right.

MOYERS: You went back.

HEDGES: Yes. Because I believe that it was better to live for one intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant my own death, rather than go back to the routine of life.

Bertolt Brecht

Do not fear death -- fear the inadequate life.

Warren Buffett

I think that a rich person should leave their children enough so that they can do anything. But not enough so that they can do nothing.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

What was difficult could be done at once, whereas the impossible might take a little longer.

Don DeLillo, Mao II

He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid form its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold.

Charles Darwin

Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.

Anonymous - 10th Century

The men of my tribe would treat him as game:
if he comes to the camp they will kill him outright.

Our fate is forked.

Wulf is on one island, I on another.
Mine is a fastness: the fens girdle it
and it is defended by the fiercest men.
If he comes to the camp they will kill him for sure.

Our fate is forked.

It was rainy weather, and I wept by the heart,
thinking of my Wulf's far wanderings;
one of the captains caught me in his arms.
It gladdened me then; but it grieved me, too.

Wulf, my Wulf, it was wanting you
that made me sick, your seldom coming,
the hollowness at heart; not the hunger I spoke of.

Do you hear, Eadwacer? Our whelp
Wulf shall take to the wood.
What was never bound is broken easily,
our song together.

Billy Collins, "Forgetfulness"

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel,
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good-bye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins iwth an L as far you can recall,
well on your way to oblicion, where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the dateo f a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Itzhak Zuckerman (Holocaust Survivor) in Shoah

If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else -- and this is what he more and more believes -- just a word trying to remember another word.

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

He felt that he carried in his head some ancient subtle strand of memory, a luminous image of proof and possibility, the coast and continent of achieved happiness.

Eric Hoffer

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Frances Cornford

Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

Joan Didion, Where I Was From

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

Sophocles

Recognize that a single day both lowers and raises again all human things.

Marianne Moore

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

Elia Kazan

Boredom, cruelty, banality are the only sins.

W. H. Auden, A Certain World

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

Ingmar Bergman

Imagine I throw a spear into the dark. That is my intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the spear. That is my intellect.

Seneca

Each day acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well.

Miles Davis

When you hit a wrong note it's the next note that makes it good or bad.

Pythagoras

Limit gives form to the limitless.

Eduoard Manet

Conciseness in art is a necessity and a grace.

Igor Stravinsky

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success.

T. H. Huxley, The Book of Beasts

Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes of modern investigation commonly enough fade away into mere dreams; but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging reality.

This quotation was copied from the Museum of Jurassic Technology, attributed to T. H. Huxley's The Book of Beasts. There is no such book. T. H. White wrote a book by that name. Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World", among others. I have decided to attribute following Mr. Wilson in any case.