Great Throughts Treasury

"To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife."

"To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love, the photographing of ravens; all the fun under liberty's masterful shadow; to-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician, the beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome; to-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers, the eager election of chairmen by the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle. To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs, the walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; to-morrow the bicycle races through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle."

"Unendowed with wealth or pity, little birds with scarlet legs sitting on their speckled eggs, eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast herds of reindeer move across"

"Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject."

"Warm are the still and lucky miles, white shores of longing stretch away, a light of recognition fills the whole great day, and bright the tiny world of lovers' arms. Silence invades the breathing wood where drowsy limbs a treasure keep, now greenly falls the learned shade across the sleeping brows and stirs their secret to a smile. Restored! Returned! The lost are borne on seas of shipwreck home at last: see! In a fire of praising burns the dry dumb past, and we our life-day long shall part no more."

"We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons."

"We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility."

"We must love one another or die."

"We were put on this earth to make things."

"We would rather be ruined than changed, We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die."

"What all schoolchildren learn, those to whom evil is done do evil in return."

"What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?"

"What living occasion can, be just to the absent?"

"What people don't realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercourse. There are three cardinal rules -- don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters."

"What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish."

"Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth."

"Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say"

"When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, and when he cried the little children died in the streets."

"When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes."

"When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others."

"When I look back at the three or four choices in my life which have been decisive, I find that, at the time I made them, I had very little sense of the seriousness of what I was doing and only later did I discover what had seemed an unimportant brook."

"When I try to imagine a faultless love or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape."

"When it comes, will it come without warning just as I'm picking my nose? Will it knock on my door in the morning, or tread in the bus on my toes? Will it come like a change in the weather? Will its greeting be courteous or rough?"

"When one has great gifts, what answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise them?"

"When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won."

"When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu."

"When the Sex War ended with the slaughter of the Grandmothers, they found a bachelor's baby suffocating under them; somebody called him George and that was the end of it: they hitched him up to the Army."

"When we do evil, we and our victims are equally bewildered."

"When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over."

"Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own."

"Will it alter my life altogether?"

"Will it come like a change in the weather?"

"Within these breakwaters English is spoken; without is the immense, improbable atlas."

"Without a quickening of the heart."

"Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods."

"Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible."

"Words have no word for words that are not true."

"Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose."

"You have to see the sex act comically, as a child."

"You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people."

"You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire."

"You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, as surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear that same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look."

"You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at."

"You shall love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart."

"You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated."

"Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them — the one, in fact, which is not a mask."

"All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work ?comes? to him."

"Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our study to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, ?I know what I like,? he is really saying ?I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,? because between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read."

"Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgment he respects. It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all men."

"A writer ? is always being asked by people who should know better: ?Whom do you write for?? The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover, I don?t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other?s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author."