Great Throughts Treasury

"The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around."

"The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof."

"The happy ending is our national belief."

"The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness."

"The strongest argument for the unmaterialistic character of American life is . . . that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable . . . the food we eat, the cramped apartments . . . the crowded subways. . . . American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault of the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it."

"The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process."

"To be a child is something one learns, as one learns the names of rivers or the kings of France. Childhood, for a child, is a sort of falseness, woodenness, stoniness, a lesson recited. Many children are aware of this ? that is, aware of being children as a special, prosy condition: "We can't do that! We're children!" Playing children is a long boring game with occasional exciting moments."

"The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero."

"The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner."

"They're looking for a place to hide because they're so cold. It could be a pile of anything."

"To be disesteemed by people you don?t have much respect for is not the worst fate."

"We all know in our gut that art educates. In other societies, they're aware of the power it has of speaking directly to the masses, teaching them to be better socialists, better citizens. The trouble is that with us it's fallen into the wrong hands. Forget the speculators... The concept of the collector is so rotten by now that it stinks."

"We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story."

"We will need much better intelligence on this facility before we seriously consider any options."

"We are the hero of our own story."

"When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans."

"What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you?re interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was."

"What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?"

"You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk."

"You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex."

"When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer."