Quotes to inspire and reflect

I’d rather have two girls at 21 each, than one girl at 42.

[ Larsen E. Whipsnade, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] You kids are disgusting, skulking around here all day, reeking of popcorn and lollipops.

You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man.

Now don’t say you can’t swear off drinking; it’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.

[ Harold Bissonette, played by W. C. Fields, replying to a real estate agent who said “You’re drunk” :] Yeah, and you’re crazy. I’ll be sober tomorrow, but you’ll be crazy the rest of your life.

[ Sam Bisbee, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] It’s a funny old world—a man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive.

[ Professor Quail, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] Now that I’m here, I shall dally in the valley—and believe me, I can dally.

[ Mr. Snavely, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast.

[ J. Effingham Bellweather, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] Godfrey Daniel!

[ Rollo La Rue, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :]

Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been made: that’s what God heard before creating the world, when there was nothing yet. I have also heard that one, he may have answered from the old, split Nothingness. And then he began.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

The ideal woman which is in every man’s mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

La Dolce Vita .

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board. . . . If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Really the writer doesn’t want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall—Kilroy was here—that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

The Long Hot Summer.

Oh yes, he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will be already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning.

I decline to accept the end of man.

The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

JEFFERSON, YOKNAPATAWPHA CO., Mississippi. Area, 2400 Square Miles. Population, Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313. WILLIAM FAULKNER, Sole Owner & Proprietor.

You cant understand it [the South]. You would have to be born there.

Why do you hate the South?

I dont hate it. . . . I dont hate it. . . . I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

They [the Negroes] will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion—not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

Too much happens. . . . Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. . . . That’s what’s so terrible.

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.

My tongue swore, but my mind is not on oath.

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

Should I have left any stone unturned.

[ Of his loss of the sight of one eye, 1735 :] Now I will have less distraction.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

[ Of Thomas More :] Omnium horarum hominem .

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.

The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

[ Of Abraham Lincoln :] His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

[ Responding to Rufus Choate’s characterization of the Declaration of Independence as “glittering and sounding generalities” :] “Glittering generalities!” They are blazing ubiquities.

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement.

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.