Great Throughts Treasury

"It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!"

"It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you anymore. ItÂ’s the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back."

"It will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people."

"It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness."

"It's queer they'd be allowin' the sick ones to read books when I'll bet it's the same lazy readin' in the house bought the half of them down with the consumption itself."

"Keep on writing, no matter what! That's the most important thing. As long as you have a job on hand that absorbs all your mental energy, you haven't much worry to spare over other things. It serves as a suit of armor."

"LARRY: [with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey] I'm afraid to live, am I?--and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself?"

"LAVINIA: He made me feel for the first time in my life that everything about love could be sweet and natural... I have a right to love!"

"LAVINIA: I love everything that grows simply-- up toward the sun-- everything that's straight and strong! I hate what's warped and twists and eats into itself and dies for a lifetime in shadow..."

"LAVINIA: I want to feel love! Love is all beautiful! I never used to know that! I was a fool! We'll be married soon... We'll make an island for ourselves on land and we'll have children and love them and teach them to love life so that they can never be possessed by hate and death!"

"Let him come! I have seen them come before -- at Margesfontein, Spion Kiopje, Modder River. Stepping into battle, left right left right, waving their silly swords, so afraid they couldn't show off how brave they was, and with mine rifle I kills them so easy! [General Wetjoen talking about the Boer War]"

"Let us be friends then from this out"

"Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!"

"Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue."

"'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves."

"My early experience with the theater through my father really made me revolt against it. As a boy I saw so much of the old, ranting, artificial, romantic stage stuff that I always had a sort of contempt for the theater."

"None of us can help the things life has done to us. TheyÂ’re done before you realize it, and once theyÂ’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what youÂ’d like to be, and youÂ’ve lost your true self forever."

"Now look here, Smithers. They's two kind's of stealing. They's the small kind, like what you does, and the big kind, like I does. Fo' de small stealing dey put you in jail soon or late. But fo' de big stealin' dey puts your picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croak. If dey's one thing I learned in ten years on de Pullman cars, listenin' to de white quality talk, it's dat same fact. And when I gits a chance to use it . . . from stowaway to emperor in two years. Dat's goin' some!"

"One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate — and remain forever scatheless."

"Or rather, I inherited the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and damned by it, as they say at the race track — damned in more ways than one."

"Supposing I was to tell you that it's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I've read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on — in quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon?"

"The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases."

"The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost."

"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too."

"TYRONE: [Stares at him -- impressed.] Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right. [Then protesting uneasily] But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death. EDMUND: [Sardonically] The makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people."

"The old -- like children -- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!"

"We have electrocuted your God. Don't be a fool."

"We are such things as rubbish is made of, so let's drink up and forget it."

"We'd be making sail in the dawn, with a fair breeze, singing a chanty song wid no care to it. And astern the land would be sinking low and dying out, but we'd give it no heed but a laugh, and never look behind. For the day that was, was enough, for we was free men — and I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come — until they're old like me."

"When men make gods, there is no God!"

"When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial."

"Where the rainbows play in the flying spray,"

"Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?"

"Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love? Why must I hide myself in self-contempt in order to understand? Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched?"

"Why canÂ’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. YouÂ’ll find what youÂ’re trying to say in him- as youÂ’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'' 'Fine! ThatÂ’s beautiful. But I wasnÂ’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so letÂ’s drink up and forget it. ThatÂ’s more my idea."

"Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time"

"You mustn't feel sorry for me. Don't you see I'm happy at last — free — free! — freed from the farm — free to wander on and on — eternally! Look! Isn't it beautiful beyond the hills? I can hear the old voices calling me to come — And this time I'm going! It isn't the end. It's a free beginning — the start of my voyage! I've won to my trip — the right of release — beyond the horizon! Oh, you ought to be glad — glad — for my sake!"

"You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin."

"You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really — except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better."

"You're two of a kind, and a bad kind."

"All I know is that if you want to get anywhere with it, or with anything else, you have got to adopt an entirely different attitude from the one you have had toward getting an education. In plain words, you?ve got to make up your mind to study whatever you undertake, and concentrate your mind on it, and really work at it. This isn?t wisdom. Any damned fool in the world knows it?s true, whether it?s a question of raising horses or writing plays. You simply have to face the prospect of starting at the bottom and spending years learning how to do it."

"I?m glad to know of your doing so much reading and that you?re becoming interested in Shakespeare. If you really like and understand his work, you will have something no one can ever take from you."

"The best I can do is to try to encourage you to work hard at something you really want to do and have the ability to do. Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy. But beyond that it is entirely up to you. You?ve got to do for yourself all the seeking and finding concerned with what you want to do. Anyone but yourself is useless to you there? What I am trying to get firmly planted in your mind is this: In the really important decisions of life, others cannot help you. No matter how much they would like to. You must rely on yourself. That is the fate of each one of us. It can?t be changed. It just is like that. And you are old enough to understand this now. And that?s all of that. It isn?t much help in a practical advice way, but in another way it might be. At least, I hope so."

"The trouble with you, I think, is you are still too dependent on others. You expect too much from outside you and demand too little of yourself. You hope everything will be made smooth and easy for you by someone else. Well, it?s coming to the point where you are old enough, and have been around enough, to see that this will get you exactly nowhere. You will be what you make yourself and you have got to do that job absolutely alone and on your own, whether you?re in school or holding down a job."