Category: Quotable

SALVIATI. I have heard such things put forth as I should blush to repeat—not so much to avoid discrediting their authors (whose names could always be withheld) as to refrain from detracting so greatly from the honor of the human race. In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea as they hit upon themselves or hear set forth by others, no matter how simple and stupid these may be, gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or hot rage—if indeed it does not make them ill.

—Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), trans. Stillman Drake

“Christ a-mighty, it’s hot, huh, kid?”

Clem Hoately, the talker, stood beside Stan, wiping the sweat from the band of his panama with a handkerchief. “Say, Stan, run over and get me a bottle of lemon soda from the juice joint. Here’s a dime; get yourself one too.”

When Stan came back with the cold bottles, Hoately tilted his gratefully. “Jesus, my throat’s sore as a bull’s ass in fly time.”

Stan drank the pop slowly. “Mr. Hoately?”

“Yeah, what?”

“How do you ever get a guy to geek? Or is this the only one? I mean, is a guy born that way—liking to bite the heads off chickens?”

Clem slowly closed one eye. “Let me tell you something, kid. In the carny world you don’t ask nothing. And you’ll get told no lies.”

“Okay. But did you just happen to find this fellow—doing—doing this somewhere behind a barn, and work up the act?”

Clem pushed back his hat. “I like you, kid. I like you a lot. And just for that I’m going to give you a treat. I’m not going to give you a boot in the ass, get it? That’s the treat.”

Stan grinned, his cool, bright blue eyes never leaving the older man’s face. Suddenly Hoately dropped his voice.

“Just because I’m your pal I ain’t going to crap you up. You want to know where geeks came from. Well, listen—you don’t find ’em. You make ’em.”

He let this sink in, but Stanton Carlisle never moved a muscle. “Okay. But how?”

Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “Listen, kid. Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek—he’s a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a little nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.'”

Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay. But after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle.

“That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.”

—William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946), Card I, “The Fool”

Dedicated to everyone who has ever had to swim the sea of script submissions to a theater festival, taken from the hypereducated Puritan snarkmeister John Milton:

…I shall briefly prove in my little half hour that the mind is neither entertained nor educated by these studies, nor any good done by them for society. And at the outset, O Collegians, I put it to you (if I can guess your feelings by my own), and I ask what possible pleasure can lurk in these gamesome quarrels of gloomy oldsters. If they were not born in the cave of Trophonius, their stench betrays their birth in the caves of the monks, they reek with the grim harshness of their authors and are as wrinkled as their fathers. Their style is terse but in spite of it they are so prolix that they bore us and nauseate us. When they are read at any length, they generate an almost instinctive aversion and an even stronger natural hatred in their readers. Too often, my hearers, when it has been my bad luck to be saddled with assignments of research in their contemptible sophistries, when both my eyes and my mind were dull with long reading—too often, I say, I have stopped for breath, and sought some miserable relief in measuring the task before me. But when—as always—I found more ahead of me than I had yet got through, how often have I wished that I had been set to shovel out the Augean ox-stalls rather than struggle with such absurd assignments. And I have called Hercules happy because Juno was so easy-going as never to give him a job like mine to struggle through.

—Prolusion III, “Against Scholastic Philosophy”

This translation from the Latin of one of Milton’s exercises from his time at Christ’s College, Cambridge is taken from Merritt Y. Hughes’s 1957 collection of the complete poems and major prose.

A… demande ce qu’il y a de nouveau, aujourd’hui, sur la plantation. Il n’y a rien de nouveau. Il n’y a toujours que les menus incidents de culture qui se reproduisent périodiquement, dans l’une ou l’autre pièce, selon le cycle des opérations. Comme les parcelles sont nombreuses et que l’ensemble est conduit de manière à échelonner la récolte sur les douze mois le l’année, tous les éléments du cycle ont lieu en même temps chaque jour, et les menus incidents périodiques se répètent aussi tous à la fois, ici ou là, quotidiennement.

—Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Jalousie (1957)

Directly after everyone’s favorite stage direction, this wonderful bit of Shakespearean hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn:

SHEPHERD: I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting— [Horns.] Hark you now! Would any but these boil’d-brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scar’d away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master. If any where I have them, ’tis by the sea-side, browsing of ivy.

—The Winter’s Tale, Act III sc. 3

↬ The Endeavour

“Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”

“Oh, no,” said Dr. Dorian. “I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”

—E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, chap. XIV

Above all, the student should cultivate the scientific attitude of mind, and he should never believe in his infallibility. The beginner’s notebook is all question marks. The student who is beginning to know birds really well often has no question marks. The notebook of the trained ornithologist always has many question marks, until death closes the notebook.

—Ludlow Griscom, “Problems of Field Identification” (1922)

One of the connections I did not make in the Wikipedia article for Ludlow Griscom that I am expanding is his dislike of Texas ornithologist H. C. Oberholser. I have transcribed many of Oberholser’s migration cards as part of the Bird Phenology Project. Griscom butted heads with a lot of his colleagues; I don’t think that he and I would have got along. But this zinger, quoted in William E. Davis, Jr, Davis, Dean of the Birdwatchers: A Biography of Ludlow Griscom (1994), is too good to keep to myself. It’s from a letter to Guy Emerson in 1943:

I happen to have known Oberholser very well indeed over a long period of years. While I have every esteem for him as an ornithologist, as a man and a human being he is a mean spirited hypocrite and, in spite of his scientific distinction, got himself detested by every ornithologist in the United States. For years his colleagues in the National Museum and the Biological Survey looked forward with keen anticipation to the happy day when he would finally reach the retiring age, and all of them would enjoy writing a sonofobituary address. (p. 150)

It was a dense white summer day and there were men in orange vests jackhammering along the middle of the broad street, with concrete barriers rimming the raw crevice and every moving thing on either side taking defensive measures, taxis in stop-and-start pattern and pedestrians sprinting across the street in stages, in tactical bursts, cell phones welded to their heads.

—Don DeLillo, “The Starveling”

The cardinal grosbeak, or Virginia redbird, is quite common in the same localities, though more inclined to seek the woods. It is much sought after by bird-fanciers, and by boy gunners, and consequently is very shy. This bird suggests a British redcoat; his heavy, pointed beak, his high cockade, the black stripe down his face, the expression of weight and massiveness about his head and neck, and his erect attitude, give him a decided, soldier-like appearance; and there is something of the tone of the fife in his song or whistle, while his ordinary note, when disturbed, is like the clink of a sabre.

—John Burroughs, “Spring at the Capital,” from Wake-Robin (1871)