Emotions and Feelings

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’.

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

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.

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

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, “social justice.”

Someone asked Sophocles, “How is your sex-life now? Are you still able to have a woman?” He replied, “Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.”

Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

[ Of Archibald Primrose, Fifth Earl of Rosebery :] [A] man who never missed a chance of missing an opportunity.

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

But this invites the occult mind,

Our throats were tight as tourniquets.

Our throats were tight as tourniquets.

If we cannot eschew hatred, at least let us eschew group hatred.

Rouse the lion from his lair.

In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.

If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and then he is no longer a thief.

The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone.

The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone.