Quotes to inspire and reflect

Vereker’s secret, my dear man—the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

She couldn’t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn’t have lost it if she had tried—that was what it was to be really rich. It had to be the thing you were.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

If I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience, and experience only,” I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”

[ Of Henry David Thoreau :] He was worse than provincial—he was parochial.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted.

To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master .

The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one’s ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room, and take boarders.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

[ Defending his practice of sharing his bed with young boys :] Why can’t you share your bed? The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone.

[ Upon being asked in court testimony whether he had memory lapses :] Not that I recall.

Look, don’t kill that fly!

Living is abnormal.

A civil servant doesn’t make jokes.

[ “Last words,” responding to a nurse’s remark that he “seemed to be a little better” :] On the contrary.

With vine leaves in his hair.

Our common lust for life.

Always do that, wild ducks do. Go plunging right to the bottom . . . as deep as they can get . . . hold on with their beaks to the weeds and stuff—and all the other mess you find down there. Then they never come up again.

The party programs grab hold of every young and promising idea and wring its neck.

The life of a normally constituted truth is generally, say, about seventeen or eighteen years, at most twenty; rarely longer. But truths as elderly as that have always worn terribly thin. But it’s only then that the majority will have anything to do with them; then it will recommend them as wholesome food for thought. But there’s no great food-value in that sort of diet.

I love this town so much that I’d rather destroy it than see it prosper on a lie.

Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population—the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it’s the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it’s the fools that form the overwhelming majority. But I’ll be damned if that means it’s right that the fools should dominate the intelligent.

The majority is never right.

I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light.

This meeting declares that it considers Dr. Thomas Stockmann, Medical Officer to the Baths, to be an enemy of the people.

I have another duty equally sacred. . . . My duty to myself.

[ Helmer :] First and foremost, you are a wife and mother.

If I’m ever to reach any understanding of myself and the things around me, I must learn to stand alone. That’s why I can’t stay here with you any longer.

Our house has never been anything but a play-room. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child. And the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.

And you call yourselves pillars of society!

Turn to the Jewish nation, the nobility of the human race. How has it preserved itself—isolated, poetical—despite all the barbarity from without? Because it had no state to burden it. Had the Jewish nation remained in Palestine, it would long since have been ruined in the process of construction, like all the other nations.

I have always been Darwin’s bulldog.

She knew well she was to give me All or Nothing!

[ Replying to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in their debate on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Oxford, England, 30 June 1860 :] A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man —a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them with an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the “Origin” [Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species ], was, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”

Science is, I believe, nothing but trained and organised common sense , differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

Truly it has been said, that to a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the Infinite may be seen.

[ Describing a mescaline-induced experience :] I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers—what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel—how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?

“If you look up ‘Intelligence’ in the new volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ,” he had said, “you’ll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather’s a present specimen of Intelligence, Military.”

The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.