Continuing my inventory of old posts here are the quotations I’ve gathered over the years. To kick it off, three much thought of passages from Hawthorn, Beckett & Thoreau respectively:
Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: “Chance and change love to deal with men’s settled plans, not with their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events, we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the future to take on inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and shatters our design in fragments.”
Samuel Beckett, Molloy: “Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”
Thoreau, Journals :“The bad are frequently good enough to let you see how bad they are, but the good as frequently endeavor to get between you and themselves.”
MORE…
Quotations: Molloy; As You Like It; “Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand” (Moby Dick) Goodwood’s speech (Portrait of a Lady), “austere composition” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus); those who work much (Thoreau), That thing is not human, but I am human (Pierre); debate and conversation (Theatetus), Kierkegaard,Thoreau, Journals. whitman, a terrific towering palisade of dark mossy massiness Pierre, Murphy’s mind, Mark of Zorro, *, Hegel, *, Song of Myself, Uncle Dick, Portnoy’s Complaint, Inseparable from Human Affairs, My Life, Swimming, “empty pockets clean hands“, democratic man, Disembodied, middle class*, Palinurus, MLK, *, Une Patrie Inconnue*An ignorance truly bovine , “It’s real, it’s us“, *, end of nature, *, Wilde, Rousseau. (From Melville’s Pierre, interesting for its mention of Ishmael.) Balzac . From Life of Johnson. Portnoy’s Complaint. “When you act you know if your acts are evil or good” “Today my deepest wish…” “Wishing I were a negro”; Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; Bill Mckibben, The End of Nature,Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Pope Francis Tweet,“Virtue is only difficult through our own fault.” (Rousseau), ‘I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be all the more terrible.’…. [KAFKA],Ecclesiastes 11:7-10, Crane and Hemingway (Unterecker), ““You can always tell when a man is writing his own name….” Lucretius: odors must be made of larger motes than voices, since they do not pass through stone . . . Matisse on wives of painters. “Turn aside from the somewhat narrow path of poetry and take the still narrower one of knight-errantry” (Don Quixote), He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognise dynamic force when he meets it (Wilde), Johnson: so much writing, so little reading. War and Peace: the King is History’s Slave. Un lagarto que a Él (Quixote), Horace, Odes 2.15.13-14; Dissonance as a token of manliness in music, Moses as portrait of the essential incompleteness to human life (kafka), dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor (Kafka), Kafka: forever starting my radius, Couple Pope quotes, Supreme and Beautiful Actions (Emerson), Pretension cannot act,Refuge from life, The Worst Man does more good than evil (Johnson), “Dramas deprived of all dramatic incident” (Fry on Cezanne still lives), Auerbach on Stendhal, Wallace Stevens The humble, Song of Myself, 48, take not the measure of they goodness , Whispering and Clucking (Faulkner), “Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble.” (FW) An unearthly day-colored substance (Faulkner) (*), Spinoza on timidity, PREFACE to Dorian Gray,
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