Great Throughts Treasury

"Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died."

"No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing."

"No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

"No one had ever had such a friend?so affectionate, so loyal, and so skillful."

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

"Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years in Maine as the time when this happened to me ? I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper."

"Once you begin watching spiders, you haven't time for much else."

"On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city?s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. 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."

"One solution... for the house of the future is to have a place called a ?dirty room.? This would be equipped with appliances for all cleaning problems, and into it would be dumped everything dirty. But in most American homes the way to have a dirty room is to have a small boy; that?s the way we worked it for a number of happy years."

"Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19."

"Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be."

"Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays."

"Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy."

"Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts."

"People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust."

"Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself."

"Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society ? things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed."

"Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom."

"Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going."

"Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college."

"She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writers. Charlotte was both."

"So I told [the doctor] about my hay fever, which used to rage just in summertime but now simmers the year round, and he listened listlessly as though it were a cock and bull story; and we sat there for a few minutes and neither of us was interested in the other's nose, but after a while he poked a little swab up mine and made a smear on a glass slide and his assistant put it under the microscope and found two cells which delighted him and electrified the whole office, the cells being characteristic of a highly allergic system. The doctor's manner changed instantly and he was full of the enthusiasm of discovery and was as proud of the two little cells as though they were his own."

"Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent."

"Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north...As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction."

"Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever . . . the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat."

"Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don?t in don?t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people"

"Swamps where cedars grow and turtles wait on logs but not for anything in particular; fields bordered by crooked fences broken by years of standing still; orchards so old they have forgotten where the farmhouse is. In the north I have eaten my lunch in pastures rank with ferns and junipers, all under fair skies with a wind blowing."

"Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote."

"Something that he wants to do. And when I answer his peremptory scratch at the door and hold the door open for him to walk through, he stops in the middle and lights a cigarette, just to hold me up."

"Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him."

"Straddled the knot, so that it acted as a seat. Then you got up all your nerve, took a deep breath, and jumped. For a second you seemed to be falling to the barn floor far below, but then suddenly the rope would begin to catch you, and you would sail through the barn door going a mile a minute, with the wind whistling in your eyes and ears and hair. Then you would zoom upward into the sky, and look up at the clouds, and the rope would twist and"

"Some of the published news was distorted, but distortion is inherent in partisan journalism, the same as it is in political rallies."

"Sometimes in writing of myself... I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound."

"The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines."

"The best writing is rewriting."

"THE BARN was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell?as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world."

"The concern of a democracy is that no honest man shall feel uncomfortable, I don?t care who he is, or how nutty he is."

"The essayist . . . can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast."

"The critic leaves at curtain fall to find, in starting to review it, he scarcely saw the play at all for starting to review it."

"Templeton was down there now, rummaging around. When he returned to the barn, he carried in his mouth an advertisement he had torn from a crumpled magazine. How's this? he asked, showing the ad to Charlotte. It says 'Crunchy.' 'Crunchy' would be a good word to write in your web. Just the wrong idea, replied Charlotte. Couldn't be worse. We don't want Zuckerman to think Wilbur is crunchy. He might start thinking about crisp, crunchy bacon and tasty ham. That would put ideas into his head. We must advertise Wilbur's noble qualities, not his tastiness."

"The delegate from Patagonia spoke up. 'I fear that the wild flag, one for all, will prove an unpopular idea.' 'It will, undoubtedly,' sighed the Chinese delegate. 'But now that there are only a couple of hundred people on earth, even the word "unpopular" loses most of its meaning. At this juncture we might conceivably act in a sensible, rather than a popular, manner.' And he produced eighty-two more shoeboxes and handed a wild flag to each delegate, bowing ceremoniously. Next day the convention broke up and the delegates returned to their homes, marveling at what they had accomplished in so short a time. And that is the end of our dream."

"The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer's ending, a sad monotonous song. Summer is over and gone, over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying. A little maple tree heard the cricket song and turned bright red with anxiety."

"The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change."

"The future, wave or no wave, seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done."

"The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase."

"The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it, singly and together, in seasons of reflection and despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing."

"The greatest dangers to liberty, said Mr. Brandeis, lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

"The Herald Tribune headed the story, PRESIDENT SAYS PRAYER IS PART OF DEMOCRACY. The implication in such a pronouncement, emanating from the seat of government, is that religious faith is a condition, or even a precondition, of the democratic life."

"The light strengthened, the mornings came sooner."

"The living language is like a cow-path: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay."