Society and the World

Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

Goddamit, look! We live here and they livethere. We black and they white. They got thingsand we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail.

One great society alone on Earth,

Further, the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. . . . We pour to the edgeof a precipice . . . and then? I can’t conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.

[ Final diary entry :] Occupation is essential. Andnow with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

When, however, one reads of a witch beingducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of awise woman selling herbs, or even of a veryremarkable man who had a mother, then Ithink we are on the track of a lost novelist, asuppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashedher brains out on the moor or mopped andmowed about the highways crazed with thetorture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, Iwould venture to guess that Anon, who wroteso many poems without signing them, wasoften a woman.

Radical Chic . . . is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its tradition—Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.

If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

Duh poor guy! . . . Maybe he’s found out by now dat he’ll neveh live long enough to know duh whole of Brooklyn. It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.

“Where they got you stationed now, Luke?” . . . [“]In Norfolk at the Navy base,” Luke answered, “m-m-making the world safe for hypocrisy.”

To Herbert Westbrook, without whose never-failing advice, help, and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

Make voyages!—Attempt them! —there’s nothing else.

I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means.

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

I never put off till to-morrow what I can possibly do . . . the day after.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

It is indeed a burning shame that thereshould be one law for men and another law for women. . . . I think that there should be no law for anybody.

Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry.

In all things connected with money I have had a luck so extraordinary that sometimes it has made me almost afraid. I remember havingread somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.