The Song of Solomon, King James translation

My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

Shakespeare, Othello

What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

Hannah Arendt

[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Stanley Kubrick

Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

Mahatma Gandhi

There is nothing that wastes the body like worry.

Henry David Thoreau

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Saul Bellow, "Seize the Day"

And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence — I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.

Bertrand Russell

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Roberto Bolaño

Then what is writing of quality? Well, what it's always been: to know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.

Shirley Hazzard, "Transit of Venus"

Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they are made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self.

Colette

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

Louise Erdrich, "Advice to Myself"

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That c loset stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Tennessee Williams

For love I make characters in plays.

William S. Burroughs

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

William S. Burroughs

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

Even if our scientists were to solve the problem of memory, we would still be at a loss. Memory, by its nature, is merely retroactive, nothing more than a way of acknowledging how we got to where we are. We will never be able to hear the cesium atom, its furious oscillations, each millionth of a second bringing us closer to some monumental change.

Laurie Anderson, Same Time Tomorrow

You know the little clock, the one on your VCR
the one that's always blinking twelve noon
because you never figured out
how to get in there and change it?
So it's always the same time
just the way it came from the factory.
Good morning. Good night.
Same time tomorrow. We're in record.

So here are the questions: Is time long or is it wide?
And the answers? Sometimes the answers
just come in the mail. And one day you get the letter
you've been waiting for forever. And everything it says
is true. And then the last line says:
Burn this. We're in record.

And what I really want to know is: Are things getting better
or are they getting worse? Can we start all over again?
Stop. Pause. We're in record. Good morning. Good night.
Now I in you without a body move.
And in our hearts we fly. Standby.
Good morning. Good night.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being? even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances. We recognise the alphabet; we are not sure of the language.

Susan Choi, The Foreign Student

The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture. No one is ever out of character.

Goethe

Whatever you can do or dream you can begin.

Thoreau/Emerson

When Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to a government which supported slavery, Emerson went to visit him.

"Henry David," said Emerson, "what are you doing in there?"

Thoreau looked at him and replied, "Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there?"

[quoted in Hayden 1988: 41-42]

Raymond Carver

At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing -- a sunset or an old shoe -- in absolute and simple amazement.

William Shakespeare, King Richard II

More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before,
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things lost past.

Act II, scene i

William Butler Yeats

And he called loudly to the stars to bend
From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they
Among themselves laugh on and sing alway …

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

Henry Louis Mencken, The American Mercury, January 1924

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

G. B. Shaw, Winston Churchill

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend ... if you have one."
George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second ... if there is one."
Winston Churchill, in response

Tony Kushner, Angels in America

Harper: I'm undecided. I feel ... that something's going to give. It's 1985. Fifteen years till the third millenium. Maybe Christ will come again. Maybe seeds will be planted, maybe there'll be harvests then, maybe early figs to eat, maybe new life, maybe fresh blood, maybe companionship and love and protection, safety from what's outside, maybe the door will hold, or maybe ... maybe the troubles will come, and the end will come, and the sky will collapse and there will be terrible rains and showers of poison light, or maybe my life is really fine, maybe Joe loves me and I'm only crazy thinking otherwise, or maybe not, maybe it's even worse than I know.

Sam Kinison

If I get married again, I want a guy there with a drum to do rimshots
during the vows.

Lady Astor

Lady Astor to Winston Churchill: "If I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee."
Churchill: "If I were your husband I'd drink it."

Stacy Schiff in the New York Times

By one estimate, 27 novels are published every day in America. A new blog is created every second. We would appear to be in the midst of a full-blown epidemic of graphomania. Surely we have never read, or written, so many words a day. Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d’oeuvres of education. We read not in continuous narratives but by linkage, the movable type of the 21st century. Our appetites are gargantuan, our attention spans anorectic. Small wonder trivia is enjoying a renaissance.

W.C. Fields

A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane . . . There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

Walker Evans

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Krzysztof Keislowski

I'm not sure it's not better to suffer than not to suffer. I think that in order to really care about yourself, and particularly someone else, you've got to experience suffering and really understand what it is to suffer, so that you hurt and understand what it is to hurt.

David Mamet

There is nothing more pragmatic than idealism.

Jack Winter, obituary from The New York Times

[I could not figure out what to quote from this. It must be read in its entirety.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/arts/
11wint.html?ex=157680000&en=301accf0d
53ea2db&ei=5124&partner=
permalink&exprod=permalink

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Dirge Without Music"

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Dorothy Parker

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

Richard Powers

Why is it that ecosystems produce rich networks, while markets - including literary markets - tend to produce monocultures?