Posts

R. L. Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey

I travel not go anywhere but to go.

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talents--which attitude has a great deal to support it.

Richard Howard, Wildflowers (voicing Walt Whitman)

Kiss me,/and catch your trolley, I've lectured long/enough

George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

Can a sane man translate Euripides?

Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Lecture

For in a real tragedy it is not the hero that perishes, it is the chorus.

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.

Viktor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (attr. to a 'French essayist')

What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, XVI

...man's tragic dependency on art...

José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote

I am myself plus my circumstances.

Cardinal Newman (via Susan Sontag's At the Same Time)

In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

Antonin Artaud (via Raymond Geuss' Who Needs a World View?)

Tout vrai langage serait incomprehensible.

Bob Thaves, Frank and Ernest, 25 May 2021

I live within my income, but surely you don't expect me to vacation there!

Norman Rush

The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.

Charles Baudelaire

[Of democracy] Un esprit Belge.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities but we live in detail.

Francis Poulenc, via Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 17 Aug 2020

In the field of song I fear no one, and being the best is always pleasant.

Flaubert, Un Coeur Simple

Elle avait eu, comme un autre, son histoire d'amour. (She, like anyone else, had her love story.)

Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

There isn't a single decent human being I know who is an economist.

Sun Ra (via John Szwed's biography Space is the Place)

What are words but words to use?