Great Throughts Treasury

"Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is."

"Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people."

"Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don't."

"The ability to try to understand existence, the ability to try to recognize the wonder and responsibility of one's own existence, the ability to know even fractionally the almost annihilating beauty, ambiguity, darkness, and horror which swarm every instant of every consciousness, the ability to try to accept it, or the ability to try to defend one's self, or the ability to dare to try to assist others; all such as these, of which most human beings are cheated of their potentials, are, in most of those who even begin to discern or wish for them, the gifts or thefts of economic privilege, and are available to members of these leanest classes only by the rare and irrelevant miracle of born and surviving 'talent."

"The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)"

"The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness."

"The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time."

"The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor? Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas."

"The graveyard is about fifty by a hundred yards inside a wire fence. There are almost no trees in it: a lemon verbena and a small magnolia; it is all red clay and very few weeds."

"The lamp was no longer giving any light beyond its own daylighted chimney, and Mrs. Gudger put it out. Even now, with the hot load of the breakfast inside me, I was stiff with cold and was not yet well awake."

"The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes."

"There were a lot of clouds," his uncle said, and continued to look straight before him "but they were blowing fast, so there was a lot of sunshine too. Right when they began to lower your father into the ground, into his grave, a cloud came over and there was a shadow just like iron, and a perfectly magnificent butterfly settled on the-coffin, just rested there, right over the breast, and stayed there, just barely making his wings breathe, like a heart." Andrew stopped and for the first time looked at Rufus. His eyes were desperate."

"They [an entire family] got a dollar and a quarter a day five days a week and seventy-five cents on Saturday, seven dollars a week, ten hours' work a day."

"This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky."

"Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense."

"Under your shelter all things come and go. Children are violent and valiant, they run and they shout like the winners of impossible victories, but before long now, even like me, they will be brought into their sleep. Those who are grown great talk with confidence and are at all times skillful to serve and to protect, but before long now they too, before long, even like me, will be taken in and put to bed. Soon come those hours when no one wakes. Even the locusts, even the crickets, silent shall be, as frozen brooks in your break sheltering."

"Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped? in the individual, and in the race."

"We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child."

"Well, now, some people learn a little quicker than others. It's nice to learn fast but it's nice to take your time too."

"What is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart? What is it, profound behind the outward windows of each one of you, beneath touch even of your own suspecting, drawn tightly back at bay against the backward wall and blackness of its prison cave..."

"whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart."

"What's tempt?" "Tempt is, well, the Devil tempts us when there's something we want to do, but we know it is bad." "Why does God let us do bad things?" "Because He wants us to make up our own minds." "Even to do bad things, right under His nose?" "He doesn't want us to do bad things, but to know good from bad and be good of our own free choice." "Why?""

"When he ran from a cop his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jog trot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint...were as distinct and as soberly in order as an automatic gearshift."

"Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?"

"You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly."

"You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and that you will too."