Great Throughts Treasury

"The provincial, the middle-class, the bourgeois, are to be found everywhere; they are necessary, I suppose ? only, when you differ from their own narrow molds, they may try to crucify you."

"The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it."

"The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time."

"The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know ? the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be?. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever."

"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence."

"The world lay before him for his picking ? full of opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die."

"There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit."

"There came to him an image of man?s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man?s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man?s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night."

"There had been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous ? and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone."

"There is no sight on earth more appealing than the sight of a woman making dinner for someone she loves."

"There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves."

"There is only one thing that a brave and honest man ? a gentleman ? should be afraid of. And that is death. He should carry the fear of death forever in his heart ? for that ends all his glory, and he should use it as a spur to ride his life across the barriers."

"There is something sad and terrifying about big families."

"They belonged to that futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and the dark damnation of man's soul can magically be healed if only they eat bran for breakfast."

"This great city has fed my imagination ? it has allowed me to dream."

"To a future world,? inhabited, no doubt, by a less acute and understanding race of men, ? all this may seem a trifle strange. If so, that will be because the world of the future will have forgotten what it was like to live in 1929."

"To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora's Box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just that much, to make it so forever."

"To every man his chance ? to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity ? to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever his manhood and his vision can combine to make him ? this, seeker, is the promise of America."

"We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past."

"We can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back."

"We must try to love one another.... The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily. It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no hating."

"We shall not come again. We never shall come back again."

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish."

"What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?"

"What will remain of a civilization that reverences a man above all the poets because he can make a cheap automobile at $500 each?"

"Where they got you stationed now, Luke?'... [']In Norfolk at the Navy base,' Luke answered, 'm-m-making the world safe for hypocrisy."

"Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending-a wind is rising, and the rivers flow."

"Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?"

"Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again."

"Writing is easy. Just put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding."

"You ask me again if I look upon writing as an escape from reality: in no sense of the word does it seem to me to be escape from reality; I should rather say that it is an attempt to approach and penetrate reality."

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

"You can't go home again."

"You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity."