Great Throughts Treasury

"No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison."

"No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories."

"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."

"None of this has to do with morality, religion, dogma or big questions about life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. Concerns reach thirty, or perhaps fifty to unwittingly give a headshot. Respect to the real value of a real education, which has nothing to do with grades and diplomas and everything to do with simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden that is daylight wherever you look we need to repeat ourselves all the time: This is water, this is water, these Eskimos may well be more than they appear. It's incredibly difficult to do this, have a conscious and adult life, day after day. And with that another clich? proves true: even our education leads to life, and she begins: Now. Wishing you much more than luck."

"Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that, he said, People don?t go to a place like that to look for other people. That?s the opposite of the whole concept that?s behind the thing."

"Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it."

"Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she?s telling the story, reliving it, she?s naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they?re full of additives and unsafe?unsafe as she?s sitting there chain-smoking, which was so patently irrational that I couldn?t even bring?yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she?s moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window?all I can tell you is she was lovely. The bottoms of her feet dirty, almost black. The moon so full it looks engorged."

"Nothing brings you together like a common enemy."

"No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable."

"Nobody who's ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever."

"Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies."

"Of a new-era?d nation that looked out for Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that was now going to retire and have its blue uniform deep-dry-cleaned and placed in storage in triple-thick plastic dry-cleaning bags and hang up its cuffs to spend some quality domestic time raking its lawn and cleaning its refrigerator and dandling its freshly bathed kids on its neatly pressed mufti-pants? knee."

"Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn?t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they?re not even very good."

"Once you have seen me, cannot think of anything else and do not want to see anyone else and no longer meet their daily responsibilities and believe that if I can have on your side all the time everything will be fine. Everything. I am the solution to their deep and enslaving need to dance cheek to cheek with perfection."

"One of the things that?s good about writing and practicing writing is it?s a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness... When students snap to the fact that there?s such a thing as a really bad writer, a pretty good writer, a great writer ? when they start wanting to get better ? they start realizing that really learning how to write effectively is, in fact, probably more of a matter of spirit than it is of intellect. I think probably even of verbal facility. And the spirit means I never forget there?s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I?m sending that person all kinds of messages, only some of which have to do with the actual content of what it is I?m trying to say."

"One clue that there?s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ?present? that?s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car?nice car by the way?and the past is the road we?ve just gone over, and the future is the head-lit road up ahead we haven?t yet gotten to, and time is the car?s forward movement, and the precise present is the car?s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it?s now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or rate?which we do, it?s the only way you can?95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a minute, etc.?how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense. You can?t even talk about time flowing or moving without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if there?s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car?s front bumper?s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters that businesses? signs and windows love so much to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between impact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain?THE END."

"One is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life OK as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock."

"One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? -- that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? -- that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit?"

"Okay, you know, is it weird to get so depressed watching a children?s Christmas special? Oh, wait, I shouldn?t say that. I mean, that?s not a good word. It?s not just sadness, the way one feels sad at a film or a funeral. It?s more of a plummeting quality. Or the way, you know, the way that light gets in winter just before dusk, or the way she is with me. All right, at the height of lovemaking, you know, the very height, when she?s starting to climax, and she?s really responding to you now, you know, her eyes widening in that way that?s both, you know, surprise and recognition, which not a woman alive could fake or feign if you really look intently at her, really see her. And I don?t know, this moment has this piercing sadness to it, of the loss of her in her eyes. And as her eyes, you know, widen to their widest point and as she begins to climax and arch her back, they close. You know, shut, the eyes do. And I can tell that she?s closed her eyes to shut me out. You know, I become like an intruder. And behind those closed lids, you know, her eyes are now rolled all the way around and staring intently inward into some void where l, who sent them, can?t follow."

"One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."

"Or something is happening, I feel a strange bond that unites us, rather as if I were falling all personal defenses and opened me wholly to you? I guess I should expect not to take advantage. Does this sound like something gross? Maybe it is. I guess I would be quieter. I do not know what to do except tell you what I feel inside, it may seem a blunder."

"Or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit artist who?s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a meta-dimension and commenting on the fiasco itself."

"Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith? Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care."

"Other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid."

"Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."

"Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death: it's a game played on the skin of a void, and the rasp of the sliding puck is the sound of that skin getting abraded away bit by bit."

"Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV)."

"Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men awaiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine?s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC?the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved?and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab?except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn?t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he?d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment?s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler?s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver?s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds?s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver?s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine?s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso ?Losses Through Theft of Service? and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver?a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns? very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated?wouldn?t simply speed away with Sylvanshine?s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds?s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwest bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he?d promised himself this morning when he?d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball?s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylvanshine could expect."

"Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus ? the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant ? and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers."

"Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace."

"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping Charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers."

"Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the death of a pet. The cathartic trauma of actually going in somewhere officially Psych-, some understanding nods, some bare indication somebody gives half a damn ? they rally, back out they go."

"People burned at birth, those affected and offended beyond justice, end to retreat into their own fire, or to raise it up."

"Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness."

"Perhaps what most of us perceive as the centers of ourselves are simply no longer needed. And we both know that the absence of function, in nature, means death. There is nothing superfluous in nature."

"People hate people, not freedom."

"Poetry, you were saying the poem. Julie smiles, touching the cheek of Faye. Faye lights a cigarette in the wind. It's just that I never liked. It's a way to turn things around. Even when I like it, is nothing more than a very oblique way of saying the obvious, at least so it seems to me. Julie smiles. It has a gap between his front teeth. Ole, he says. But consider that very, very few of us are able to deal with the obvious. '"

"Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky."

"Prior to Y.P.W.c.?s Freedom of Speculation Act, credible socio-historical data on the origins and evolution of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents from obscure, adolescent, nihilistic Root Cult to one of the most feared cells in the annals of Canadian extremism was regrettably patchy and dependent on the hearsay of sources whose scholarly veracity was of an integrity somewhat less than unimpeachable."

"Perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it."

"Probably the second biggest one is learning to pay attention in different ways. Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph."

"Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what's going on inside of me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head. What you don't yet know are the stakes of this struggle. In the twenty years since my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand these stakes, and to see that the liberal arts clich? about teaching you how to think was actually shorthand for a very deep and important truth. Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think."

"Postmodern irony and cynicism?s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what?s wrong, because they?ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony?s gone from liberating to enslaving. There?s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who?s come to love his cage... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."

"Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move."

"Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear."

"Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people."

"Real leaders are people who help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own."

"Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today?s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the Oh how banal. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of over-credulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."

"Radical history of concentrated era postindustrial. When they were introduced, he made ??a witty comment because I wanted to be liked. She let out a loud guffaw because he wanted to be liked. Then the two took their car and drove home alone, staring at the road, with the same grin on his face. A man who had introduced them did not like too well either, but pretended he did because he was concerned much to have good relations with everyone. After all, you never know, do you not? Right? Is not ?"

"Ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek..."