Great Throughts Treasury

"Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough."

"Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent. I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred."

"Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential."

"Nothing is black where the sun and the only place that looks black is where the sun do not shine lights. What people need is to be color rich. There is no other solution."

"O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station."

"Of course, in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too."

"Oh shame, shame! Oh crying shame! How can we? Why do we allow ourselves? What are we doing? The last little room of dirt is waiting. Without windows. So for God?s sake make a move, Henderson, put forth effort. You, too, will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain, and there will be nothing left but junk...While something still is -- now! For the sake of all, get out!"

"Oh yes, I got up on my hind legs like an orator and sounded off to everyone."

"Oh, God, Wilhelm prayed, Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy."

"On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every race and genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence - I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally."

"Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology."

"One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine."

"One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge ? that is the picture."

"One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet."

"One thing should be clear to you now. Money-making is aggression. That's the whole thing. The functionalistic explanation is the only one. People come to the market to kill. They say, 'I'm going to make a killing.' It's not accidental. Only they haven't got the genuine courage to kill, and they erect a symbol of it. The money. They make a killing by fantasy."

"One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away."

"One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment."

"One's language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English.... Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity."

"Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was broken."

"Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can?t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated."

"Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing ? a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized.""

"Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it."

"Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse."

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

"People do not do things for which he has a real talent, but those who pushes the concern. If you are good at repairing cars, should sing the Don Giovanni; if they can sing, they have to be an architect; and if they have the bump of architecture, want to become school inspectors or abstract painters or whatever. NO MATTER WHAT!"

"People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature."

"People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen?economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day's work done, they want to be entertained."

"Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again ? a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking."

"Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt."

"Public life drives out private life. The more political our society becomes (in the broadest sense of ?political? ? the obsessions, the compulsions of collectivity) the more individuality seems lost? National purpose is now involved with the manufacture of commodities in no way essential to human life, but vital to the political survival of the country. ? The whole matter ? has to do with invasion of the private sphere (including the sexual) by techniques of exploitation and domination."

"Quickly, I too bent and bowed in the short pants and corky white helmet with my overheated face and great nose. My face can be like the clang of a bell, and because I am hard of hearing on the right side I have a way of swinging the left into position, listening in profile and fixing my eyes on some object to help my concentration. So I did. I waited for him to say more, sweating boisterously, for I was confounded down to the ground. I couldn't believe it; I was so sure that I had left the world"

"Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them."

"Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity."

"Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler?s view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. ? What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans."

"Search me, I said. I'm a city boy myself. They must be crocuses."

"Sentiment and brutality, never one without the other, like fossils and oil."

"Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet."

"She doesn?t have any terrific talent for acting, but that?s how it appears to go. People don?t do what they have a talent for but what the preoccupation leads to. If they?re good at auto-repairing they have to sing Don Giovanni; if they can sing they have to be architects; and if they have a gift for architecture they wish to become school superintendents or abstract painters or anything else. Anything! It?s a spite. It?s having to prove full and ultimate self-sufficiency or some such monster dream that you don?t need anyone else to do these things for you."

"She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me - for the time being, anyway - the most important things I ask of her. It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, Darling, please bring me a towel. I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marche' department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the auffe-eua machine, the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone (like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my; shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast."

"She transformed his miseries into sexual excitements and, to give credit where it was due, turned his grief in a useful direction."

"She was cuckoo about dime stores, where she bought cosmetics and pins and combs. After we locked the expensive purchases in the station wagon we went into McCory's or Kresge's and were there by the hour, up and down the aisles with the multitude, mostly of women, and in the loud-played love music. Some things Thea liked to buy cheaply, they maybe gave her the best sense of the innermost relations of pennies and nickels and explained the real depth of money. I don't know. But I didn't think myself too good to be wandering in the dime store with her. I went where and as she said and did whatever she wanted because I was threaded to her as if through the skin. So that any trifling object she took pleasure in could become important to me at once; anything at all, a comb or hairpin or piece of line, a compass inside a tin ring that she bought with great satisfaction, or a green billed baseball cap for the road, or the kitten she kept in the apartment - she would never be anywhere without an animal."

"She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand."

"She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread."

"Since the last question, also the first one, the question of death, offers us the interesting alternatives of disintegrating ourselves by our own wills in proof of our freedom, or the acknowledging that we owe a human life to this waking spell of existence, regardless of the void."

"So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all."

"Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there?s the devil to pay."

"Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don?t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there?s a leaf or two it?ll be represented."

"Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me."

"Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves."

"Some people, if they didn?t make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep, said Mintouchian. Even the Son of Man made it hard so He would have enough in common with our race to be its God."