Quotations
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There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
Edith Hamilton (1867–1963), U.S. classical scholar, translator. Introduction to Three Greek Plays (1937).
Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it … respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.
Ernesto Sábato (b. 1911), Argentinian novelist, essayist. Independent (London, 20 June 1992).
The … problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a “real” man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.
Quentin Crisp (b. 1908), British author. The Naked Civil Servant, ch. 9 (1968).
Give us a religion that will help us to live—we can die without assistance.
Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915), U.S. author. Selected Writings, vol. 1, “Index” (1921).
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain, "Bringing Up Father," Reader's Digest, September 1937.
Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.
Václav Havel (b. 1936), Czech playwright, president. Living in Truth, pt. 1, sct. 6, “The Power of the Powerless” (1986).
"Let there be light!" said God, and there was light!
"Let there be blood!" says man, and there's a sea!
Lord Byron (1788-1824), English poet. Don Juan, cto. 7, st. 41
"My country, right or wrong" is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober."
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. The Defendant, "Defence of Patriotism" (1901).
I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher, mathematician. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2, ch. 1 (1968), of World War I.
Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-99), U.S. lawyer, orator. Speech, Manhattan Liberal Club (published in Truth-Seeker, 28 Feb. 1892).
Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.
Germaine Greer (b. 1939), Australian feminist writer. The Female Eunuch, “Soul: The Stereotype” (1970).
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied … but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
John Berger (b. 1926), British author, critic. “The Soul and the Operator,” in Expressen (Stockholm; 19 March 1990; repr. in Keeping a Rendezvous, 1992).
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
Lawrence Durrell (1912–90), British author. Justine, pt. 3 (1957).
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas—uncertainty, progress, change—into crimes.
Salman Rushdie (b. 1947), Indian-born British author. Is Nothing Sacred?, Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture, 6 Feb. 1990.
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes—love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself—and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others—should we call it “joy”?
Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946), U.S. feminist critic. “Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia,” speech, 16 April 1974, at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. (published in Our Blood, ch. 1, 1976).
Drink! for you know not whence you came
nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go,
nor where.
Omar Khayyám (11th–12th century), Persian astronomer, poet. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, st. 74 (tr. by Edward FitzGerald, 1879).
The people I’m furious with are the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.
Anita Loos (1893–1981), U.S. screenwriter. Quoted in: Observer (London, 30 Dec. 1973).
Is there any thing beyond?—who knows? He that can’t tell. Who tells there is? He who don’t know. And when shall he know? Perhaps, when he don’t expect it, and generally when he don’t wish it. In this last respect, however, all are not alike; it depends a good deal upon education, something upon nerves and habits—but most upon digestion.
Lord Byron (1788–1824), English poet. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 3, (ed. by Leslie Marchand, 1973–81), entry for 18 Feb. 1814.
The cannon thunders … limbs fly in all directions … one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice … it’s Humanity in search of happiness.
Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), French poet. Appendix to Prose Poems, “Plans and Notes: For Civil War” (published in Complete Works, vol. 1, “Shorter Prose Poems,” ed. by Yves-Gérard le Dantec; rev. by Claude Pichois, 1953).
The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards—material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden.
Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), British author, painter. The Art of Being Ruled, “Call Yourself a Man!” (1926).
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, & everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten (1913–76), British composer. Letter, 29 June 1937 (published in Letters from a Life: Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, vol. 1, “A Working Life,” 1991). Britten wrote this while listening to the “Abschied”—the finale of Mahler’s song cycle Das Lied von der Erde.
New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959), U.S. architect. The Living City, pt. 1, “The-Shadow-of-the-Wall—Primitive Instincts Still Alive” (1958).
The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.
David Hume (1711–76), Scottish philosopher, historian. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, pt. 1, “The Stoic” (1742; repr. in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, vol. 3, 1826).
I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
Alexander Pope (1688–1744), English satirical poet. Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness [Frederick, Prince of Wales].
I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch … and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order … by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.
Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen] (1885-1962), Danish author. Seven Gothic Tales, "The Old Chevalier" (1934).
Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn’t got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady’s watch are revolving more purposely than he is.
James Thurber (1894–1961), U.S. humorist, illustrator. Collecting Himself, “Thinking Ourselves Into Trouble,” pt. 1 (1989).
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
George Eliot (1819–80), English novelist, editor. Felix Holt, the Radical, Introduction (1866).
I have found little that is “good” about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian psychiatrist. Letter, 9 Oct. 1918 (published in The International Psycho-Analytical Library no. 59, “Psycho-Analysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oscar Pfister,” 1963).
Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), U.S. author. Death in the Afternoon, ch. 11 (1932).
Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.
Leonard Cohen (b. 1934), Canadian singer, poet, novelist. The Spice-Box Of Earth, “Lines From My Grandfather’s Journal” (1961).
Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time—is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
Cesare Pavese (1908–50), Italian poet, novelist, translator. The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935–1950, 1952; tr. 1961), entry for 30 Oct. 1940.
