Category: Quotable

He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smoldering log also sighed. And immediately Okonkwo’s eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply.

—Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, ch. 17

A unique view of snow, provided by Laura Ingalls Wilder and The Flibbertigibbet:

“I had to gopher my way to the stable this morning,” Pa explained.

The longest period of fasting was fixed by his impresario at forty days, beyond that term he was not allowed to go, not even in great cities, and there was good reason for it, too. Experience had proved that for about forty days the interest of the public could be stimulated by a steadily increasing pressure of advertisement, but after that the town began to lose interest, sympathetic support began notably to fall off; there were of course local variations as between one town and another or one country and another, but as a general rule forty days marked the limit.

—Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What is we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 991

Quiet, shush, something mysterious is happening, here before us is a fifty-year-old author, on his knees at the altar of art, creating, thinking about his masterpiece, about its harmony, precision, and beauty, about its spirit and how to overcome its difficulties, and there is the expert thoroughly studying the author’s material, whereupon the masterpiece goes out into the world and to the reader, and what was conceived in utter and absolute agony is now received piecemeal, between a telephone call and a hamburger.

—Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, ch. 4, “Preface to ‘The Child Runs Deep in Filidor'”

A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge laughed. Webster regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so.

Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.

But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.

My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.

You’re a formidable riddler and I’ll not match words with ye. Only save my crusted mug from out your ledger there for I’d not have it shown about perhaps to strangers.

The judge smiled. Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, ch. XI

Methinks Webster is a 19th-century Facebook refusenik.

ROY COHN. So send me my pills, with a get-well bouquet, PRONTO, or I’ll ring up CBS and sing Mike Wallace a song: (Sotto voce, with relish) the ballad of adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund. (He holds the phone away from his ear; Martin is excited.) Oh you only think you know all I know. I don’t even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true!

—Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Perestroika, Act 1 (“Spooj”) sc. 5

… [Winnie said,] “I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.”

—Don DeLillo, White Noise, ch. 30

At the heart of the Park idea is this notion: that by virtue of being an American, whether your ancestors came over on the Mayflower or whether they just arrived, whether you’re from a big city or from a rural setting, whether your daddy owns the factory or your mother is a maid: You, you are the owner of some of the best seafront property this nation’s got; you own magnificent waterfalls; you own stunning views of mountains and stunning views of gorgeous canyons. They belong to you. They’re yours. And all that’s asked of you is to put it in your will for your children, so that they can have it, too. Hopefully, you won’t let it be sold off, you won’t let it be despoiled. Hopefully, you’ll provide for proper maintenance of this property that is yours. But that’s all you’ve got to do. Now that’s quite a bargain.

—Dayton Duncan, The National Parks, a film by Ken Burns

My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results. (pp. 511-512)

—C.G. Jung, “On Synchonicity,” trans. R.F.C. Hull, collected in The Portable Jung

One evening, after a week or two of rehearsals [of Our Mrs. McChesney], I was leaving the theater rather late, when most of the company had gone. George Hobart and I had had some changes to discuss. [Augustus] Thomas was still there. Near the door I called out across the stage, “Good night, Mr. Thomas.”

He glanced up. “Ah—good night, Miss—uh—uh—mmmm——”

“Ferber,” I prompted him, icily. He had seen me every day for weeks.

“Yes, yes, of course, Ferber. Ferber. I never can remember these Jewish names.”

“That must have been difficult for you when Mr. Frohman was producing your plays,” I retorted, by some lucky stroke; and slammed the door. Nothing slams more satisfactorily than a good heavy metal stage door.

—Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, p. 218

HAMLET. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

Act III, sc. ii