Great Throughts Treasury

"There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam."

"There's something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket."

"These empty days. How do you spend them?"

"Tunner himself was an essentially simple individual irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp. Contenting himself with not quite being able to seize an idea was a habit he had acquired in adolescence, and it operated in him now with still greater force. If he could get on all sides of a thought, he concluded that it was an inferior one; there had to be an inaccessible part of it for his interest to be aroused. His attention, however, did not spur him to additional thought. On the contrary, it merely provided him with an emotional satisfaction vis-…-vis the idea, making it possible for him to relax and admire it at a distance."

"We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

"We're all monsters, said Daisy with enthusiasm. It's the Age of Monsters."

"We've never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We're hanging on to the outside for all we're worth, convinced we're going to fall off at the next bump."

"What a wonderful thing to be an American! he said impetuously."

"When I first came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing and magic every day in the streets."

"When I was young? Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus, it would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth ? she hesitated. Port laughed abruptly. ? And now you know it?s not like that. Right? It?s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tasted wonderful, and you don?t even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it?s nearly burned down to the end. And then?s when you?re conscious of the bitter taste."

"When stripŠd snakes shall creep upon us and the nervous screams of birds make silent all the fountains and the orchards and when these have caught upon the wing each wing that flutters from the sky then shall I and then shall I rip out the smiles from garden walks transform the minnows into hawks tarantulas and bees. Then shall I and then shall I make each whining thing."

"Things will go on like this forever. Nothing shall shatter. No tree. No blade of grass shall be there. Nothing but blue rocks shall fill the valley where I sleep. Things shall go on like this forever. Things shall be unbroken. No action shall shatter. Nothing shall escape and nobody shall shatter ideas and no being shall shatter. No tree. No blade of grass shall be present to witness the incident. Everything shall be always thus. Nothing shall be turned or moved. Touched. All shall forever be so."

"These were the first moments of a new existence, a strange one in which she already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround her. The person who frantically has been counting the seconds on his way to catch a train, and arrives panting just as it disappears, knowing the next one is not due for many hours, feels something of the same sudden surfeit of time, the momentary sensation of drowning in an element become too rich and too plentiful to be consumed, and thereby made meaningless, non-existent."

"Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. It was often on trips that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary."

"Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home."

"Whoever invented the concept of fairness, anyway? Isn't everything easier if you simply get rid of the idea of justice altogether? You think the quantity of pleasure, the degree of suffering is constant among all men?"

"Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble."

"Yes, said Dyar automatically, never having given much thought to what it would be like not to be an American. It seemed somehow the natural thing to be."

"You can't discipline the whole country."

"You know what? he said with great earnestness. I think we?re both afraid of the same thing. And for the same reason. We?ve never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We?re hanging on to the outside for all we?re worth, convinced we?re going to fall off at the next bump. Isn?t that true?"

"You know, everyone here's got some little peccadillo he's hoping to hide."

"You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call 'le bapteme de solitude.' It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears...A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came... Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price."

"You want us all to be snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters, he raged, at one point in their conversation... Naturally, Eunice replied in her most provoking manner. It would be far preferable to being a nation of tenth-rate pseudo-civilized rug-sellers."