Great Throughts Treasury

"If I can fool a bug... I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs."

"If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble."

"I'm staying right here, grumbled the rat. I haven't the slightest interest in fairs. That's because you've never been to one, remarked the old sheep . A fair is a rat's paradise. Everybody spills food at a fair. A rat can creep out late at night and have a feast. In the horse barn you will find oats that the trotters and pacers have spilled. In the trampled grass of the infield you will find old discarded lunch boxes containing the foul remains of peanut butter sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, cracker crumbs, bits of doughnuts, and particles of cheese. In the hard-packed dirt of the midway, after the glaring lights are out and the people have gone home to bed, you will find a veritable treasure of popcorn fragments, frozen custard dribblings, candied apples abandoned by tired children, sugar fluff crystals, salted almonds, popsicles, partially gnawed ice cream cones, and the wooden sticks of lollypops. Everywhere is loot for a rat--in tents, in booths, in hay lofts--why, a fair has enough disgusting leftover food to satisfy a whole army of rats. Templeton's eyes were blazing. Is this true? he asked. Is this appetizing yarn of yours true? I like high living, and what you say tempts me. It is true, said the old sheep. Go to the Fair Templeton. You will find that the conditions at a fair will surpass your wildest dreams. Buckets with sour mash sticking to them, tin cans containing particles of tuna fish, greasy bags stuffed with rotten... That's enough! cried Templeton. Don't tell me anymore I'm going!"

"In every queen there's a touch of floozy."

"If nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is."

"If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! (William Strunk)... Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?"

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day."

"In good time he was to discover that he was mistaken about Charlotte. Underneath her rather bold and cruel exterior, she had a kind heart, and she was to prove loyal and true to the very end."

"In the loveliest town of all where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla."

"In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone."

"I'm really too young to go out into the world alone, he thought as he lay down."

"In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living."

"In the second place, I am not interested in pigs. Pigs mean less than nothing to me."

"In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the under side, translating them into a new language."

"It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

"It is a miracle that New York ?works at all. The whole thing is implausible."

"'It can't be,' said the Chinese. 'That is one of the virtues of my little flag. I should remind you that the flag was once yours, too. It is the oldest flag in the world, the original one, you might say. We are now, in an original condition again, you might say. There are very few of us.' The German delegate arose stiffly. 'I would be a poor man indeed,' he said, 'did I not feel that I belonged to the master race. And for that I need a special flag, natrlich.' 'At the moment,' replied the Chinaman, 'the master race, like so many other races, is suffering from the handicap of being virtually extinct. There are fewer than two hundred people left in the entire world, and we suffer from a multiplicity of banner.'"

"It is best to have a strong curiosity, weak affiliations."

"It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression."

"It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members."

"It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people."

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

"It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn't catch the remark because I wasn't paying attention."

"It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when conditions are right. Man's curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out."

"It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition. A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow."

"It was a delicious meal -- skim milk, wheat middlings, leftover pancakes, half a doughnut, the rind of a summer squash, two pieces of stale toast, a third of a gingersnap, a fish tail, one orange peel, several noodles from a noodle soup, the scum off a cup of cocoa, an ancient jelly roll, a strip of paper from the lining of the garbage pail, and a spoonful of raspberry jello."

"It takes more than genius to keep me reading a book."

"It?s not often a true friend comes around."

"Just the minute another person is drawn into some one's life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fetes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardiness, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble, and many others, all of which are entirely foreign to the original urge and way off the subject."

"Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace."

"It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything."

"Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch."

"Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men."

"Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it."

"Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up."

"Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same."

"Life?s meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same."

"Meetings bore me."

"Many references have been made in this book to 'the reader,' who has been much in the news. It is now necessary to warn you that your concern for the reader must be pure: you must sympathize with the reader's plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader's wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living."

"Means I sit still a good part of the time and don't go wandering all over creation. I know a good thing when I see it, and my web is a good thing. I stay put and wait for what comes. Gives me a chance to think."

"Maybe it?s all right, she said. But for the first time in my life I?m beginning to feel like an outsider in my own land."

"Most people believe almost anything they see in print."

"Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma."

"Never hurry and never worry!"

"New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine."

"Much of life is insupportable and that no individual play can have a happy ending."

"Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair."

"New York provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing."

"New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up."

"New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."