Literature and Words

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.

As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; Carve every word before you let it fall.

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation, not overturning it.

A day when I do not write tastes of ashes.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns as [Samuel] Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit.

Gonzo journalism . . . is a style of “reporting” based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this.

One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu .