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