Great Throughts Treasury

"Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world."

"Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not"

"Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other."

"For a full minutes Jiggs stood before the window in a light splatter of last night's confetti lying against the window-base like spent dirty foam, light poised on the balls of his grease-stained tennis shoes, looking at the boots."

"Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world."

"For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago."

"For the holy are susceptible to to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid… and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy."

"For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that fain’t and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair."

"From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that--a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried pain’t itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."

"Frenchman's Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and side of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which--the gutted shell on an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades--were still known as the Old Frenchman's place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk's office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them."

"For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it won't stand a whole lot of racking. It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work and not no one part used no more than needful."

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."

"From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking. A fain’t path led from the road to the spring. Popeye watched the man--a tall, thin man, hatless, in worn gray flannel trousers and carrying a tweed coat over his arm--emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring."

"Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief"

"Gettysburg. . . . You can’t understand it. You would have to be born there."

"God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet."

"Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling. Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, ‘This is my own.’"

"Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain."

"Government was founded on the working premise of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence."

"Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all"

"He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."

"He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer."

"He had a face like a nutcracker; a scrawny man of no particular age, with merry secretive eyes."

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear."

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

"He was as calm as a god who has seen both life and death, and seen nothing of particular importance in either of them."

"He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet. But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty: he might have seen himself as in numberless avatars, in silence, doomed with motion, driven by the courage of flagged and spurred despair; by the despair of courage whose opportunities had to be flagged and spurred."

"He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad."

"He remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple clichés served his few simple passions and needs and lusts."

"He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond."

"He wore a sweater too large, crepe-colored cherry, black against the surging water. The loose hair, hairstyles now, looked black. The face, neck and arms on the covers were gray. After the others left she stayed for a time with his head hidden under the sheet. So it continued until you hear the door close, until you erase the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, the doctor's voice which was expressed with volubility, the panting of Miss Reba. Sons who acquired, in the dark hall, the color of moonlight, and disappeared. After Temple jumped out of bed and went to the door, making sliding latch. He returned to the bed and covered herself, including her head, getting there huddled up lacking in the air. Ultimate reflexes saffron-colored dyed the roof and part of the walls where they could see the shadows of Palisade Avenue, the west rose against the sky. She saw them disappear, consumed by successive yawns curtain. He also saw the last light condense on the border of the clock dial and go, in the dark, round hole disc suspended in nothingness, the primal chaos, and then change to crystal ball that contained in its quiet and mysterious depth, the ordered chaos of the world complicated and gloomy on whose flanks, marked with scars, old wounds steeply rolling forward into the darkness where they hide new disasters."

"He was looking forward to his visit not only for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit, but with the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will, even though a little weakly, in the sun and air which men drank and moved in and talked and dealt with one another - a pleasure no small part of which lay in the fact that he had not started yet and was absolutely nothing under heaven to make him start until he wanted to. He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body's slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendican’t to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course."

"Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."

"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."

"Husband and wife did not need to speak words to one another, not just from the old habit of living together but because in that one long-ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn't and couldn't last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be."

"I am not one of those women who can stand things."

"I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period."

"I be dog if hit don't look like sometimes that when a fellow sets out to play a joke, hit ain't another fellow he's playing that joke on; hit's a kind of big power laying still somewhere in the dark that he sets out to prank with without knowing hit, and hit all depends on whether that ere power is in the notion to take a joke or not, whether or not hit blows up right in his face, like this one did in mine."

"Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder."

"Home again, his native land; he was born of it and his bones will sleep in it."

"History is not was, it is."

"How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls."

"How false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life."

"I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God."

"I can stand on my own feet; I don't need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up."

"I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine."

"I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever."

"I could hear my watch whenever the car stopped, but not often they were already eating Who would play a Eating the business of eating inside of you space too space and time confused Stomach saying noon brain saying eat o clock All right I wonder what time it is what of it."

"I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town."

"I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance."