Great Throughts Treasury

"No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it."

"Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves."

"Nothing on Earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more"

"On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away."

"On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies? straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

"Once, a great handful of a girl out west told him - I never did love you. [?]How mean of her to salve her spit curled conscience by trying to take away their past! In the kitchen he had started to use those very words on Lou - they sprang readily to mind, as wounding words do - but he stopped himself."

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is a signal to spend it now. Something more will arise later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water."

"One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war, says Ernest Becker, is that each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die."

"Only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself."

"Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire."

"Numbers from one to ten, however, are called "God." In other words, counting to ten you would say, "God," God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God." It is possible to distinguish among these numbers by the tone in which each is pronounced. "God," for example, corresponding to our "five," is pitched relatively high on the musical scale, and accordingly sounds an inquisitive, even plaintive, note. It is in sharp contrast to the number corresponding to our "ten," which has a slightly accented, basso finality, thus: "God.""

"Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called ultimate concerns, unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability, and that drew nutty people, or drove them nuts."

"No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formula for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?"

"Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone."

"Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial filmmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer. And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcedentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers."

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise."

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery."

"Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms."

"Outside shadows are blue, I read, because they are lighted by the blue sky and not the yellow sun. Their blueness bespeaks infinitesimal particles scattered down inestimable distance."

"Outside the great American forest is heaving up leaves and wood from the ground. Inside I stand at the window, god, with your name wrapped round my throat like a scarf."

"Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks... The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. For the English department, she told me.... But, To smooth off her rough edges, she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?"

"People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all."

"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

"People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home."

"People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books."

"Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world."

"Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly."

"Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, an infinite storm of beauty. The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth?s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back."

"Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth... If Tinker Mountain erupted, I?d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present... Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio... It is, as Ruskin says, 'not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.' . . . I have to say the words, describe what I'm seeing. . . . But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present."

"Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities -- looking over my own shoulder, as it were -- the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot and flung out of sight as if it had never grown. And time, which had flowed down into the tree bearing new revelations like floating leaves at ever moment, ceases. It dams, stills, stagnates. (Harper Perennial Edition 82)"

"She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay."

"She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die."

"Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live."

"Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

"Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden."

"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."

"So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now."

"So the Midwest nourishes us... and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters [...]. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities. Mother knew we would go; she encouraged us."

"Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all."

"Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?""

"Starlings are notoriously difficult to "control." The story is told of a man who was bothered by starlings roosting in a large sycamore near his house. He said he tried everything to get rid of them and finally took a shotgun to three of them and killed them. When asked if that discouraged the birds, he reflected a minute, leaned forward, and said confidentially, "Those three it did.""

"That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very comprising terms that are the only ones that being offers."

"The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."

"The creation is not a study, roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine... Even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible level, creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for. The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough. But look what happens. You open the door and all heaven and hell break loose."

"The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork -- for it doesn't, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl -- but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz."

"The creator is not puritan. A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share?an enormous share?of the sunlight and air."

"The creatures I seek do not want to be seen."

"The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will's spirits and the intellect's chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with a stilled tongue. Fuge, tace, quiesce. The waiting itself is the thing."

"The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart."

"Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you."