Great Throughts Treasury

"Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death."

"Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning."

"To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought."

"To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being."

"To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling...At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female...Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses."

"To emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell."

"To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt."

"To this day it hovers in plump passivity above the fertile fields. It is a perfect emblem for the people and the land."

"Toward the east and the multiplying unknown."

"True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed."

"Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes."

"Unarmed, he dared not venture deep inside lest enterprising beasts process his flesh into sausage cakes and brew their winters ale from his blood."

"Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence."

"Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef."

"Verifications in the intestinal texts of several hens."

"Violence stinks, no matter which end of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan. Sometimes people are just begging for that frypan, and if we weaken for a moment and honor their request, we should regard it as impulsive philanthropy, which we aren't in any position to afford, but shouldn't regret it too loudly lest we spoil the purity of the deed."

"Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."

"Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!"

"We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves."

"We had a lot of young players this season. I thought they have improved over the course of the year. Overall, I have been pleased. As far as the sectional goes, I like our draw and I feel like we are playing our best basketball right now."

"We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a ‘reality’ that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue–only we’ve all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we’re given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We’re given Time magazine, and Reader’s Digest, daily papers, and the six o’clock news; we’re given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we’re given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We’re attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when’s the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?"

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."

"Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich."

"We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves."

"We're proposing some stakes increases and more significant increases than the prior year. If the TOC agrees to those, that will take up some of that money. I think we will take a more aggressive approach to our overnights."

"We've got something for just about everyone. I think our horsemen and our fans are going to be tickled with what we have to offer."

"What bothers me today is the lack of, well, i guess you'd call it authentic experience. so much is a sham. so much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized... we're standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. The sham is everywhere."

"What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism-as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons-Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?"

"What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other peoples' decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity. If civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the sh*thouse of existence, the people are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry. Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if it's sober and severe. Your Cheerful Dumb are not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly LIKE themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

"When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act."

"When life demands more of people than they demand of life - as is ordinarily the case - what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death"

"When one is on a pilgrimage to the Canyon of the Vaginas, one has to be careful about asking for directions."

"When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old, rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity, and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities."

"When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It's that simple. This suggests that it isn't love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it's always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still. The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know: 1. Everything is part of it. 2. It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

"When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing."

"When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It's hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay."

"When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders."

"When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter."

"When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence."

"Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective."

"While Switters appreciated profanity's occasional value as verbal punctuation, as a highly effective vehicle for emphasis, he was scornful when louts swore as a substitute for vocabulary, youths as a substitute for rebellion, stand-up comics as a substitute for wit."

"Who knows how to make love stay? 1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay. 2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. 3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."

"Wild Ducks Flying Backward [title]"

"With the exception of chocolate dentures, there's probably nothing in this world more impractical than glass shoes; their life expectancy must be as short as their discomfort level is horrific. So, was Cinderella a naive ditz, a dingbat with masochistic tendencies? Did her fairy godmother, who presumably possessed the power to conjure up the finest Milanese leathers, have a twisted sense of humor? Or was there some hidden logic behind sending the humble little hearth honey to the royal ball shod in brittle silica?"

"Words that sabre-toothed tigers may have once heard."

"You can love ‘em till your well runs dry, Belford, but you can never love ‘em enough, and you know it. No matter how much others might love you, you can’t love yourself unless you’re in charge of your own actions, and you’ll never take charge as long as you can get away with blaming your shortcomings and misfortunes on your family or society or your race or gender or Satan or whatever…"

"You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House."

"You fling open the trunk with what amounts to a prayer in your heart, praying that the conspicuously silent Andre has not perished for lack of oxygen--a detail you should have considered earlier--and are immediately reminded of the Mona Lisa. Andre and Leonardo's famous model share an ability to look quizzical and curious despite the fact that neither has eyebrows. Ham actors, for whom eyebrows are the banners and billboards of all emotion, could learn a lot about expression from the browless Mona, the browless macaque."

"You have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement. This movement of yours, does it have slogans? inquired the Chink. Right on! they cried. And they quoted him some. Your movement, does it have a flag? asked the Chink. You bet! and they described their emblem. And does your movement have leaders? Great leaders. Then shove it up your butts, said the Chink. I have taught you nothing."

"You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming."