Great Throughts Treasury

"Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Politics isn't polarized between ideas as much as it is divided between teams in an endless color war. The famous geopolitical map of 2000 painted the states red and blue." - Ellen Goodman

"What do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace." - Ellen Goodman

"I'm of the glamorous ladies at whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, so I stay at home with a book." - Dorothy Parker

"To me, the raveled sleeve of care is never more painlessly knitted up than in an evening alone in a chair snug yet copious, with a good light and an easily held little volume sloppily printed and bound in inexpensive paper. I do not ask much of it - which is just as well, for that is all I get. It does not matter if I guess the killer, and if I happen to discover, along around page 208, that I have read the work before, I attribute the fact not to the less than arresting powers of the author, but to my own lazy memory. I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours. In all reverence I say Heaven bless the Whodunit, the soothing balm on the wound, the cooling hand on the brow, the opiate of the people." - Dorothy Parker

"She went of her own accord,' answered the master; 'she has a right to go if she please. Trouble me no more about her. Hereafter she is only me sister in name: not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper." - Eric Temple Bell

"Just to avoid the pursuit of which is true, to avoid the inevitable pursuit of the fittest. Incapable of non-justice, without justice is tyrannical power. Justice is not necessarily opposed the strength, because there are always bad people. Justice of the non-power remains in the dock. So, we need to combine strength with justice, fair to do so strong, you need to have a justice of the fittestÂ… justice open to debate. Understood at first sight, the unquestioned power. For this reason, we could not give strength to justice, because power, go against justice, he said it was fair." - Erich Auerbach

"Age is my alarm clock, the old man said. Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"All the passengers were crowded over on the landside of the ship, watching through the narrow windows the careened hulk of a freighter, visibly damaged by shellfire, which had driven ashore to beach her cargo. She lay aground, looking against the sand in that clear water like a whale with smokestacks that had come to the beach to die." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"By guts I mean, grace under pressure." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I am so in love with you that there isnÂ’t anything else." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"If I do it you won't ever worry?' 'I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple.' Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"It was strange how easy being tired enough made it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"ItÂ’s his sense of self-preservation. The great Italian sense. The greatest Italian sense." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"She should have. All women should see it. It's a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their daughters about this face." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very normal to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but also very fine." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin me by jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he knows that this is how he should make his fight. He cannot know it is only one man against him, nor that it is an old man. But what a great fish he is and what will he bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"To be a successful father there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"When you have a child, the world has a hostage." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"In order to be one, you must first be two." - Esther Perel

"I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength." - Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum

"But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you — and other people — any trouble." - Eudora Welty

"For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely." - Eudora Welty

"Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience." - Eudora Welty

"Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within." - Eudora Welty

"Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers." - Eudora Welty

"Then the light changed the water, until all about them the woods in the rising wind seemed to grow taller and blow inward together and suddenly turn dark. The rain struck heavily. A huge tail seemed to lash through the air and the river broke in a wound of silver." - Eudora Welty

"In my eyes, concepts of theology have only as much value as they are able to interpret experience. It seems to me that we have long reached the point where we theologians only talk to ourselves and debate with our own history of concepts." - Eugen Drewermann

"The value of rhythms in our lives." - Eugene Peterson

"I have found that there is no attitude so bizarre that one will not encounter it sooner or later if one travels far enough." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"In general. . . novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time-now, too, I suppose-actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"With faith and hope and courage we hold our heads erect and with dauntless spirit marshal the working class for the march from Capitalism to Socialism, from Slavery to Freedom, from Barbarism to Civilization." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs