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Literary Quotes
Wolfe's English 10 '00-'01
"It's really hard to imagine how afraid I was then; how I pulled the covers over my head at night and prayed to hurry up and get older so I wouldn't care so much." "It isn't me who'll go away, it's you. People will just look at you differently than they do now. Other people will like you, and you'll go to them. It's not a big deal, just the way things work." "...this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak." "I�m almost glad this war came along. It�s like a test, isn�t it, and only the things and the people who�ve been evolving the right way survive." "The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all" "So, you can really yearn for sorrows past to come again! What wrenched my heart was love, love after all..." "children, end your grief. No one alive is free and clear of pain." "it's no disgrace for a man, even a wise man, to learn many things and not be too rigid. You've seen trees by a raging winter torrent, how many sway with the flood and salvage every twig, but not the stubborn-- they're ripped out, roots and all. Bend or break. "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. [...] every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!" "No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged." "To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was far more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd." [...dickens, hopeless romantic...] "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." "Dad says I'll understand when I grow up. he tells me that all the time now and I want to be big like him so that I can understand everything. It must be lovely to wake up in the morning and understand everything. I wish I could be like all the big people in the church, standing and kneeling and praying and understanding everything." "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones." "What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder." Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers." "In spite of their sadness-- because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another-- the three men were happy."
01-02
"It is really to the credit of human nature, that, except where selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates." "She wanted-- what some people want throughout life-- a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy." "All thinking men are atheists." "He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget." "Everything seemed in good condition. It evidently made no difference whether I was there to look after things or not. I had imagined that the condition of the cars, whether or not things were obtainable, the smooth functioning [...] depended to a considerable extent on myself. Evidently it did not matter whether I was there or not." "You should love Him." "The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them." "How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass, and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance." "The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. [...] Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour." "Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure." "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. [...] The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts." "He smiled understandingly-- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It [...] concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired." "All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to." "That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any, You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write, "F--- you" right under your nose." "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
02-03
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." "it was one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like 'God is everywhere.'" "It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. [...] Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood." "You are clever, O samana," said the Venerable One. "You know how to speak cleverly, my friend. Beware of too much cleverness!" "But is not every life, is not every work lovely?" "I have found a thought: The opposite of every truth is just as true! You see: A truth can be uttered and clad in words only if it is one-sided. One-sided is everything that can be thought with thoughts and said in words-- everything one-sided, everything half, everything is devoid of wholeness, of roundness, of oneness." "Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. [...] Words are not good for the secret meaning, everything instantly becomes a bit different when we utter it, a bit adulterated, a bit foolish [...] I also very much agree that one man's treasure and wisdom always sound like foolishness to another." "Seeing through the world, explaining it, despising it may be crucial to great thinkers. But all I care about is to be able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it or myself, to be able to view it and myself and all beings with love and admiration and awe." "My friend, your anxiety turned to fear, and your fear turned to sorrow. But sorrow is better than fear. For fear impoverishes always, while sorrow may enrich." "But hate no man and desire power over no man. For I have a friend who taught me that power corrupts." "I don't like work-- no man does-- but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-- for yourself, not for others-- what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it really means." "The mind of man is capable of anything-- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage-- who can tell?-- but truth-- truth stripped of its cloak of time. [...] Principles won't do. Acquisitions [...] No; you want a deliberate belief." "Droll thing life is-- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself-- that comes too late-- a crop of unextinguishable regrets." "He had faith-- don't you see?-- he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything-- anything."
random bored reading
"I heard the sound of a violin. The sound of a violin, in this dark shed, where the dead were heaped on the living. [...] a fragment from Beethoven's concerto. I had never heard sounds so pure. In such a silence.[...] I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of it was gliding on the strings-- his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again. [...] When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse." "He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up, what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune." "Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing" "This planet has billions of passengers on it, and those were preceded by infinite billions and there are vaster billions to come, and none of these, no, not one, can I hope ever to understand. Never! And when I think how much confidence I used to have in understanding-- you know?-- it's enough to make a man weep." "I often want to say things and they stay in my mind. Therefore they don't actually exist; you can't take credit for them if they never emerge." "You know, that might be the answer-- to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail." "There was so much unhappiness in the world, he reflected, bowing his head dismally beneath the tragic thought, and there was nothing he could do about anybody's, least of all his own." "He was pinched perspiringly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope." "Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up." "What a lousy earth! [...]How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? [...] How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors [...] and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere." "Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all." "He wondered too about the reckless sentimentality of extending concern to a person who needed it. That was not the American way." "If you can delay the decision of what you want to do with your life until you're old enough to retire, you will never have to make it." "Sometimes I mean what I say and don't mean it at the same time. Tell me, [...] do you think in my checkered history I ever really wanted to do any of the work I found myself doing?" "[She] said she would miss him. He replied with perfection that he would not give her the chance, wondering, even as he gazed sincerely into her earnest blue eyes and warmly pressed her hand good-bye, whether he would he would ever even remember to want to see her again." "Milo, all of us are in the race of the century to come up with the ultimate weapon that could lead to the end of the world and bring everlasting fame to the victor who uses it first." "Noodles was intelligent enough to understand that he himself probably would not think much of himself either if he were somebody other than himself." "Hardened onlookers were watching with smiles a spindly, shabby man at work with a razor blade, cutting away the rear trouser pocket of a drunk on the sidewalk to gain nonviolent possession of the wallet inside, while two neatly uniformed policemen stood waiting patiently for him to finish before taking him to custody [...] Contemplating the scene was a third policeman, the one on a large chestnut horse [...] The man with the razor glanced up every few seconds to stick his tongue out at him. Everything was in order, no peace was disturbed. All played their roles out jointly, like conspirators in a tapestry of symbolic collaboration overripe with meaning that defied explanation. It was as peaceful as heaven and as disciplined as hell." "He was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I almost hate to put it that way. It sounds immoral. But it gave me an episode, something dramatic to talk about, and something to make me remember that the war was really real." "If she brought home a test paper of ninety in algebra or geometry, perhaps the sole person with a grade so high, he wished to know, after a reluctant compliment, why she had missed the one problem in ten she had failed to solve. An A- would evoke questions about the minus, an A would impel him to sulk about the absence of the plus. There was no drollery in his seriousness; there was a wry kind in her retelling." "Even in a recession, the country was awash in money. Even amid poverty, there was room for much waste." "Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people." "It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think-- to say it in your own words, without compromise." "A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death." "Artists fall in love, of course, but love isn't their primary gift. They love their high function, the use of their genius, not actual women [...] A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him." "My feeling is that you couldn't be known thoroughly unless you found a way to communicate certain "incommunicables"-- your private metaphysics." "He had a real intelligence, you see, a working, persistent mind, whereas I was only occasionally, fitfully, intelligent. What he thought out, and thought through, sat upon a foundation of tested principles.-- How shall I put it?... As birds went he was an eagle, while I was something like a flycatcher." "Ravelstein, however, held that examples of great personalities among scientists were scarce. Great philosophers, painters, statesmen, lawyers, yes. But great-souled men or women in the sciences are extremely rare. 'It's their sciences that are great, not the persons.'" "In the surface of things you saw the heart of things." "'Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.'" "You might tell me something of great importance, and I would understand it well enough, but refuse entirely to take it in. This was no ordinary stubbornness." "The brain is a mirror and reflects the world." "Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can't be unique and universal at the same time." "Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts." "[...]perhaps best of all, we have music. Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development-- almost instantaneously after emerging on the earth by any evolutionary standard-- the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad." "[...]just as I was taking it all in, nodding appreciatively at the beauty of the whole idea, I suddenly felt something like the silent flicking of a mercury wall switch and it all turned to nonsense inside my head. [...] My mind is, if anything, more alert, grasping avidly at every phrase, but then the switch is thrown and what comes in is transformed into an unfathomable code."
Fortune Cookies...
You may attend a party where strange customs prevail.
Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's waterlily
Your love of music will be an important part of your life.
He who hurries cannot walk with dignity
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