Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole question lies in the color. 

Margalo's pitches for senior quote

 I want to thank my chiropractor for always having my back.

I want to thank my nail tech for always holding my hand.

I want to thank my massage therapist for always making me feel kneaded.

Tenor saxophonist Al Cohn [via Brian Chellas]

A gentle­man is someone who knows how to play an accordion, but doesn't.

Attributed to Henry Thoreau in Elmore Leonard, Cat Chaser [via Brian Chellas]

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Lady Astor and Winston Churchill

LADY ASTOR: If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee.

WINSTON CHURCHILL: If you were my wife, I'd drink it.

From Wilder, You All Spoken Here [via Brian Chellas]

If brains were dynamite he wouldn't have enough to blow his nose.

 

            If a bird had his brains he'd fly backwards.

 

            He's so ugly no fly'd ever land on him.

 

            Looks like he's been chewin' tobacco and spittin' in the wind.

 

            When he was a baby he was so ugly they fed him with a slingshot.

 

            She's so fat that if she had to haul ass she'd have to make two trips.

 

            [As tearful as] a child that's lost his chewing gum on a henhouse floor.

 

                        

Dean Acheson [via Brian Chellas]

Don't just do something, stand there.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables [via Brian Chellas]

The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so, by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters, in the deportment of those about them; . . . 

Ecclesiastes, 12:12 [via Brian Chellas]

. . . be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

 

Burma Shave ad [via Brian Chellas]

She kissed the hairbrush / by mistake. / She thought it was / her husband Jake.

 

Burma Shave ad [via Brian Chellas]

No lady likes / to dance or dine / accompanied by / a porcupine.

de Palfrey, in John le Carre, The Russia House [via Brian Chellas]

Just the usual triumph of the fattest, disguised as a rational deduction.

 

Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Copper Beeches” [via Brian Chellas]

Crime is common. Logic is rare.

Saint Augustine, Confessions, book 4, chapter 6 [via Brian Chellas]

I was at the same time thoroughly tired of living and extremely frightened of dying.

Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All

Be strong, be smart, bring your toothbrush, be kind, work hard, be beautiful.

Werner Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed

Read, read, read, read, read.

F Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 The charm of knowledge would be small, were it not so much shame has to be overcome on the way to it.

Louise Gluck, “A Slip of Paper”

To get born, your body makes a pact with death,  

and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—    

You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.  

But for a long time you hear every sound.  

It's a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.   

Louise Gluck, “A Slip of Paper”

No one taught me how to care for my body.  

You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.  

Once you're free of them, your wife takes over, but she's nervous,  

she doesn't go too far. So this body I have,  

that the doctor blames me for—it's always been supervised by women,  

and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (after Sophocles)

[…]

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

WH Auden, September 1, 1939



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Siri Hustvedt, The Delusions of Certainty

We are born of someone, but we do not die in pairs. 

Reverend Lovejoy to Ned Flanders in The Simpsons (S8, E8, written by Steve Young)

Ned Flanders: Reverend, I need to know - is God punishing me?

Reverend Lovejoy: Oooohh… Short answer, 'yes' with an 'if'. Long answer 'no' with a 'but'.

Erykah Badu in conversation with Austin Kleon

My biggest fear is the same as my biggest hope: That I am seen.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal phase of feminine reverie abandoned to itself, in which the isolated heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling, as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice; misalliances are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of souls; and as many an unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune, is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand ideas, so such and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who has polished boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but inside, a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions; the post of a drinking-shop.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

There are meditations which may be called vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return to earth.

Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

The world turns. But luckily, if it falls, it breaks.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Because from much further back I had had to face certain difficulties, until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is, and you cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.

Victor Huge, Les Misérables

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to ill-treat the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of them has a will principle, and there is an I in the upper infinity as there is an I in the lower infinity. The I below is the soul; the I on high is God.

E.B. White, letter to Miss R., 1973

You ask, "Who cares?" Everybody cares. You say, "It's been written before." Everything has been written before.

E.B. White, letter to Miss R., 1973

You ask, "Who cares?" Everybody cares. You say, "It's been written before." Everything has been written before.

Carl Jung

"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you."

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

The Voltairians added, "Will Boulatruelle catch the devil, or will the devil catch Boulatruelle?" The old women made a great many signs of the cross.

Queen Elizabeth speaking to the bereaved of 9/11

Grief is the price we pay for love.

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

[Javert] halted a few paces in the rear of the mayor's armchair, and there he stood, perfectly erect, in an attitude almost of discipline, with the cold, ingenuous roughness of a man who has never been gentle and who has always been patient; he waited without uttering a word, without making a movement, in genuine humility and tranquil resignation, calm, serious, hat in hand, with eyes cast down…

Paul Eldridge [source?]

A man will die for an idea, provided the idea is not quite clear to him.

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language - six rules for writers

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

José Esteban Muñoz

Queerness "allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. …We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds," he added. "Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world."

Tomas Tranströmer, Baltics

...if you take [jelly fish] out of the water their entire form disappears, like when an unspeakable truth is lifted up out of the silence and expressed as lifeless gel, yes, they're untranslatable, they must stay in their own element.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, April 3, 1968

The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.

Margalo Goldbach, "The Throat of Reality"

My inner poet is a perspective.
Her knife is at the throat of reality.
The hairs on her neck always stick up
because of the imaginative shivers she sends down her spine.
She has a purse. It carries the concept
of infinity and the absence of light.
She ventures through fiction and truth
to find carefully articulated words.
She wears the past as a gown.
She makes it work.
Her hand is always in mine.

Anne Sexton, “Her Kind”

…

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind

Kiese Laymon

Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every God ever asked of believers.

Shirley Hazard, Transit of Venus

So far, California offers the greatest contrast imaginable between the works of God and the desecrations of Man. California is a beautiful woman with a foul tongue.

Ernest Hemingway - Letter to Waldo Pierce, 1st Oct 1928

What you ought to do is write you big lazy bastard. My god it is hard for anybody to write. I never start a damn thing without knowing 200 times I can't write—never will be able to write a line—can't go on—can't get started—stuff is rotten—can't say what I mean—know there is a whole fine complete thing and all I get of it is the bacon rinds. You would write better than anybody but the minute it becomes impossible you stop. That is the time you have to go on through and then it gets easier. It always gets utterly and completely impossible.

Thank God it does—otherwise everybody would write and I would starve to death.

Alan Rickman's diaries, 10 March 1994

All morning bonking (screen type), humping, exhausting. Life definitely not mirroring art – if anybody had sex in that position they would break their wrists second time out.

Lemony Snicket, An Unfortunate Series of Events (via Margalo Goldbach)

A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Anti-Fragile

Wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. So you want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

Werner Herzog in IndieWire

In my workshops, [the students] have to make a film within eight or nine days. That has been very helpful for them.