Great Throughts Treasury

"Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book."

"Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality."

"Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing... Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits."

"Somewhere among every man's ancestors is a prince or a lord, a priest or a saint, and don't forget it. Wake up! Inherit the wealth of your ancestors!.. Stop living like a mouse, live like the rich people do."

"That finished my secret business. Now I sell fortunes and forecasts."

"The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself."

"The business of polishing my shoes satisfies my soul."

"The boy on the Oakland porch goes to sleep upon the universe of ice and wakes up and remembers the death of his father and mother, and sees the sun."

"The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith."

"The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably."

"The comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on."

"The comedians I am thinking about are the comedians of the world, not of the stage."

"The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better."

"The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better."

"The Maharajah: One nickel, one secret. No exchanges, no refunds."

"The Maharajah: I had three secrets and sold them all."

"The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?"

"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."

"The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today…"

"The order I found was the order of disorder."

"The purpose of my life is to put off dying as long as possible."

"The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness."

"The rose taught me the third (secret)… be, beget, begone."

"The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited."

"The race was over. I was last, by ten yards. Without the slightest hesitation I protested and challenged the runners to another race, same distance, back. They refused to consider my proposal, which proved, I knew, that they were afraid to race me. I told them they knew very well I could beat them."

"The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real."

"The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy - the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops."

"The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit."

"The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too."

"The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business."

"The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn."

"Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all."

"The world was my home and I was glad to be in it."

"Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect."

"There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all."

"There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth."

"There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind."

"There is only good and bad art."

"There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones."

"There's a pretty woman forever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?"

"They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit."

"There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign."

"There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future."

"This transformation in kids - from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream - is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God."

"This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said."

"This was such bad writing that it was good."

"Three times in my life I have been captured: by the orphanage, by school, and by the Army. I was four years in the orphanage, seven or eight in school, and three in the Army. Each seemed forever, though. But I'm mistaken. The fact is I was captured only once, when I was born, only that capture is also setting free, which is what this is actually all about. The free prisoner."

"To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book."

"Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace."

"To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing."