Great Throughts Treasury

"Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away."

"Being right was largely a matter of explanations."

"Between human beings there are only two alternatives, either brotherhood or crime."

"Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death."

"Boredom is the conviction that you can't change... the shriek of unused capacities."

"Boredom is the shriek of unused capacities."

"Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day."

"Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similarity. Oh, Henderson, man cannot keep still under the blows.... A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition."

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!"

"But a man's character is his fate... and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles."

"But enough of that--here I am. Hineni! How marvelously beautiful it is today. He stopped in the overgrown yard, shut his eyes in the sun, against flashes of crimson, and drew in the odors of catalpa-bells, soil, honeysuckle, wild onions, and herbs."

"But I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness."

"But I had this idea also that you don't take so wide a stance that it makes a human llife impossible, nor try to bring together irreconcilables that destroy you, but try out what of human you can live with first. And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched."

"But I was afraid I?d have to give up on an ideal explanation of her past life. Oh well, there didn?t have to be one necessarily."

"But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee's footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry, dry goods, oilcloth, and song hits--that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue--the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-bourne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops."

"But Mimi- her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrible manifestations it would appear."

"But now the emphasis has shifted to making it. People have surrendered their personal moral objectives to government or schools or psychologists. It?s a change that accelerated with the boom after the war? There has been a surrender to pragmatism; the true is what makes you successful and the false is what makes you fail. But I wonder what happens to faith, hope and charity in such a situation? People began to form their moral ideas not in the old way but by their professions and guilds; that tends to transfer sin to the corporation."

"But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required. This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself. But then I forgot which book it was."

"But she's a nut, and nuts win."

"But the blind did not go around very much. They sat, and didn?t seem to have any conversation, and soon you were aware of leisure gone bad. I had learned something of this during Einhorn?s days of dirty mental weather. Or of the soul, not the mind, the sick evil of not even knowing why anything should ail you since you?re resigned to accept all conditions."

"But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly creature, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently. External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can?t get justice and he can?t give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It?s made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that?s what their power is. There?s one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a huge invention, which is the invention maybe of the world itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world?with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and movies?becomes the actuality That?s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what?s real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and the flowers of a version."

"But this has taken place in inner consciousness, which is outlaw and accepts no check. What of it? Life is possible anyhow. Except that even legitimate and reasonable things have to come through this Mongolia, or clear-light desert minus trees. What do we respect more than commerce and industry? But when Mr. Cecil Rhodes of the British Empire weeps many tears because he can?t do business with the blazing stars, this is not decadence but inner consciousness speaking over all the highest works of presumptuous man."

"But what is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks ? and this is its thought of thoughts ? that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb. The brittle shell of glass loses its tiny vacuum with a burst, and that is that. And this is how we teach metaphysics on each other. You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You cannothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think."

"California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that."

"California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me."

"Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole."

"Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life."

"Charlotte came in herself, like a big bridal edifice in her veil and other lace, carrying long-stemmed flowers. With her there wasn?t much hiding of the behind-the-scenes of life to keep a man in the bonds of love, as Lucretius advises when he tells you to make allowances for mortality. You only had to see her practical mouth to know everything about mortality was admitted in advance, though she did for form?s sake all that other women do. Her frankness gave her a kind of nobility."

"Conquered people tend to be witty."

"Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn?t any memory. The power that?s established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right."

"Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything."

"Depressives cannot surrender childhood--not even the pains of childhood."

"Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you."

"Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?"

"Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody's business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them."

"Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy."

"Every book, every story, has a sort of invisible signature at the front. And when you've written the first few lines of a story, those govern all the rest that follows."

"Every human life has a secret essence, it's a secret even to the possessor, because you don't know what to make of it."

"Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. I'm fainting, please get me a little water. You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood."

"Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable."

"Every twenty years or so the earth renews itself in young maidens. You know what I mean? Her cheeks had the perfect form that belongs to the young; her hair was kinky gold. Her teeth were white and posted on every approach. She was all sweet corn and milk. Blessings on her hips. Blessings on her thighs. Blessings on her soft little fingers which were somewhat covered by the cuffs of her uniform. Blessings on that rough gold. A wonderful little thing; her attitude was that of a pal or playmate, as is common with Midwestern young women"

"Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."

"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."

"Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes normal. You don't miss the foundation of feeling until you begin to look for yourself and can't find a support in the affects for a self."

"Everyone looked like an image of playing cards - one face up and the other down."

"Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent."

"Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way."

"External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe... That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real."

"Facts always are sensational."

"Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy. Turns into reality. It holds, it alters it redeems!"