Great Throughts Treasury

"Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing."

"She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years."

"The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbors, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference."

"The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence."

"Something in me resists the calendar expectation of happiness. Merry Christmas yourself! It mutters as it shapes a ghostly grin."

"The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?"

"The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write."

"The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart."

"The way to write a book is the application of the seat of one's pants to the seat of one's chair."

"The racism, the sexism, I never let it be my problem, it's their problem. If I see a door comin' my way, I'm knockin' it down. And if I can't knock down the door, I'm sliding through the window. I'll never let it stop me from what I wanna do."

"The wisdom of one generation will be the folly of the next."

"There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent."

"The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please."

"There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going."

"There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be."

"They will review a book by a writer much older than themselves as if it were an over-ambitious essay by a second-year student . . . It is the little dons I complain about, like so many corgis trotting up, hoping to nip your ankles."

"This country is geology by day and astronomy by night."

"Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something suspiciously bovine about them."

"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink."

"To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven."

"To show a child what has once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own, so that there is now a double delight seen in the glow of trust and affection, this is happiness."

"We plan, we toil, we suffer ? in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake up just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs. And, again I cry, how rarely it happens! But when it does happen ? then what a moment, what a morning, what a delight!"

"We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison."

"We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types."

"What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others."

"When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old. I missed out coming and going."

"Western man is schizophrenic."