Great Throughts Treasury

"It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself."

"It was quite simply true that the Irish cook's meat pie was one of the finest table experiences of my young life."

"It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work."

"It wasn't morning yet, but it was summer and with daybreak not many minutes around the corner of the world it was light enough for me to know I wasn't dreaming. My cousin Mourad was sitting on a beautiful white horse."

"Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the rock in a meaningless-meaningful way."

"Let me choose my friends in my own way."

"It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read."

"It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give."

"I've forgotten more than you'll ever know."

"It's all over. We can begin to forget Armenia now. Andranik is dead. The nation is lost… I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it."

"Lionel whispered because he was under the impression that it was out of respect for books, not consideration for readers."

"Live, for this is the time of your life."

"Mrs. Sandoval, Homer said swiftly, your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong."

"Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive."

"My superficial manners stink and my profound manners are almost as bad."

"My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world… when Andranik went away... I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry…"

"Love of the streets is the love out of which I see deeply I love God, how near I come to the truth."

"Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation."

"My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?"

"My illness is life itself."

"My work has always been the product of my time."

"My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision."

"My work is writing, but my real work is being."

"My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve."

"Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind."

"No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living."

"No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart."

"No foundation. All the way down the line... Whole world. I don't want money from people like you."

"No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend, and there are many more of these than one would suspect."

"Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money."

"Nothing good ever ends."

"Nothing has ever been more sure-fire than truth and integrity."

"Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that."

"Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again."

"Now, having a play on the same bill with a play by the one and only, the good and great, the impish and noble, the man and superman, George Bernard Shaw, is for me an honor, and I think a most fitting thing."

"One nickel, one secret. No exchanges, no refunds."

"One day, back there in the good old days when I was nine and the world was full of every kind of magnificence, and life was still a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin Mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up by tapping on the window of my room."

"One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater."

"One of us is obviously mistaken."

"People are people. Don't be afraid of them."

"People is all everything is, all it has ever been, all it can ever be."

"Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you."

"Power goes with genius only."

"Remember that every man is a variation of yourself."

"Remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic there is always the comic and in the midst that which is most evil there is always much good."

"Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away."

"Shaw… is the tonic of the peoples of the world. He is health, wisdom, and comedy, and that's what I am too… If you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw."

"San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth."

"She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all."

"Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed...In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."