Emotions and Feelings

Whipping and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilitiesdecline.

Whipping and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilitiesdecline.

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.

Am I no a bonny fighter?

The world is so full of a number of things,

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,

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

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

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’.

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.

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.

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

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

[ 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.”

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.

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.