Prose
"We make a great mistake when we think that people whose lives have been intimately woven into our own, cease to influence us when they die. While they are living they are to us, as Albert was to David, many things. But with death, change and colour are sealed off. The quintessential thing that they have been in our lives is fixed and stabilised for good. All the rest is discarded. The dead become part of the dynamics of our spirit, of the basic symbolism of our minds."
"The Face By The Fire", Laurens Van Der Post
"...here swift my heart grows wings and soars with me high above our white and slanted Everest. I find religion here; I find the experience before the dogma; the fact before the theory. I witness the advent of woman into heaven."
"The Face By The Fire", Laurens Van Der Post
"It was too good to be true, and it was true in a way that was not good. My heart was filled with dismay. For years I had longed for Anna Maria to be able to feel for David all that that embrace implied. But I would have preferred the old, strange, inexplicable but honest hostility to this slick and deft concealment. Anna Maria had crossed the frontiers of our wood-burning lantern-lit antiquity and passed into the grown-up world of calculation and deliberation, of graceful and infinitely intelligent pretence."
"How could you, who knew me so well, make such a mistake? You've shown me your true self- what I loved was the lie."
Rene Gallimar in "M. Butterfly"
"Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods... worship all you see, and more will appear"
Peter Schaffer(?), "Equus"
"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Thomas Jefferson
"On History"
The Historical Review
"The great [in history] are not solitary; out of the night come
the voices of those who have gone before, clear and courageous; and
so through the ages they march, a mighty procession, proud,
undaunted, unconquerable. To join in this glorious company, to
swell the immortal paeon of those whom fate could not subdue - this
may not be happiness; but what is happiness to those whose souls
are filled with that celestial music? To them is given what is
better than happiness: to know the fellowship of the great, to live
in the inspiration of lofty thoughts, and to be illuminated in
every perplexity by the fire of nobility and truth."
Betrand Russell
"To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create,
you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent
rambling.
"You must write every single day of your life.
"You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let
them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one
moment, brilliant the next.
"You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to
sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy
heads.
"I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will
last a lifetime.
"I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.
"May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories -
science fiction or otherwise.
"Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next
20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
-Ray Bradbury
from "Dubliners" - from the story Araby
"Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to
romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to
go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring
streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the
curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on
guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of
street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a
ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises
converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I
bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to
my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself
did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not
tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself
out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know
whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how
I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a
harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the
wires."
James Joyce
"A child is a person who is going to carry on what you have started. He is going to sit where you are sitting, and when you are gone, attend to those things which you think are important. You may adopt all the policies you please, but how they are carried out depends on him. He will assume control of your cities, states and nations. He is going to move in and take over your churches, schools, universities, and corporations. All your books are going to be judged, praised or condemned by him. The fate of humanity is in his hands."
Abraham Lincoln
"When bad men combine, the good must associate;
else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice
in a contemptible struggle."
Edmund Burke
"We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospect."
Anais Nin
"It is a truth of life that we grow more tolerant as we grow older, for there is more to tolerate within ourselves"
-Pascha, from "Dr. Zhivago"
"There is a luxury in self-reproach.When we blame ourselves we feel that no-one else has the right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."
Oscar Wilde, from "A Picture Of Dorian Gray"
"None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves"
Oscar Wilde, from "A Picture Of Dorian Gray"
