Quotes to inspire and reflect

Eliza made her desperate retreat across the river just in the dusk of twilight. The gray mist ofevening, rising slowly from the river, enveloped her as she disappeared up the bank, and theswollen current and floundering masses of icepresented a hopeless barrier between her andher pursuer.

I learned three things in Zurich during thewar. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re eithera revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re notyou might as well be an artist as anything else.Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you mightas well be a revolutionary . . . I forget the thirdthing.

[ On James Joyce :] An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to publicnotice to be universally recognized.

I hate writing, but I love having written.

A Footnote to History.

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir ThomasBrowne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann.

Am I no a bonny fighter?

A birdie with a yellow bill

How do you like to go up in a swing,

The world is so full of a number of things,

There is but one art—to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge.

Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.

Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God’s sakegive me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

Oh, Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

A. A violent order is disorder; and

It was her voice that made

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

If her horny feet protrude, they come

It did not give of bird or bush,

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

I know of only one rule: style cannot be too clear , too simple .

Un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route .

La politique au milieu des intérêts d’imagination, c’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert . Politics in the middle of things concerning the imagination are like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. . . . An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people—we go on.

Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas comeup an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin’.

Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself, it’s the way they say it.

[ Remark, 1925 :] The Jews have produced only three originative geniuses; Christ, Spinoza, and myself.

[ Of Ernest Hemingway :] Anyone who marries three girls from St. Louis hasn’t learned much.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

[ Of Ezra Pound :] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

They were regular in being gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, they learned many little things that are things in being gay, they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.

There are no small parts, there are only small actors.

In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

[ When asked by French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval to encourage Catholicism in the Soviet Union in order to appease the Pope, 13 May 1935 :] The Pope? How many divisions has he got?

[ Remark upon being informed that the United States had developed the atom bomb :] Well, that’s fine. Let’s use it. What’s the next item on the agenda?