Great Throughts Treasury

"From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets."

"For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts."

"Governing is occupying but not interesting, governments are occupying but not interesting"

"Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything"

"French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything."

"Grammar little by little is not a thing. Which may gain. There. Make twenty-five be a woman. The meaning of that does not interest me. It is a complexion that interests that makes ridiculous because that does not make it something else. But it does make them which is again me. Make twenty-five be a woman. I do not lose it. The color is there. Do you see. Dependent entirely upon how one word follows another. Who knows how Howard likes hearing. I can do it so easily it always makes grammar but is it grammar. Forget grammar and think about potatoes. Grammar after all has to do with why they were presented."

"Hemingway's remarks are not literature."

"Growing has no connection with audience. Audience has no connection with identity. Identity has no connection with a universe. A universe has no connection with human nature."

"History takes time. History makes memory."

"Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough."

"Human nature, human nature acts as it acts when it is identified when there is an identity but it is not human nature that has anything to do with that it is that anybody is there where they are, it is that that has to do with identity, with government and propaganda with history with individualism and with communism but it has nothing to do with the human mind... because the human mind writes what there is and what has identity go to do with that... nothing at all."

"Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates."

"I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school."

"I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do."

"I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like someone else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers."

"Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it."

"I am because my little dog knows me."

"I am I because my little dog knows me."

"I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it."

"I cannot give advice. How can I when I do not authorize success. I authorize it alright. Smile."

"I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing"

"I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich."

"I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher."

"I had always been so much taken with the way all English people I knew always were going to see their lawyer. Even if they have no income and do not earn anything they always have a lawyer."

"I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient."

"I don’t envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not."

"I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed."

"I just tell you and though I don't sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there ain't any answer, there ain't going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer."

"I have lived half of my life in Paris, not the half the made me but the half in which I made what I made."

"I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go."

"I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it."

"I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity."

"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

"I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe."

"I love my love with a b because she is peculiar."

"I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged."

"I tell you boys there ain’t any answer, just you believe me, there ain’t any answer... there ain’t going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer."

"I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything."

"I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods."

"I was talking like this to the Princeton professor and he said well if these are the facts there is no hope and I said well what is hope hope is just contact with the facts."

"I was clear, Alice Toklas says and very often mistaken but anyway I am clear I am a good American, I am slow-minded and quickly clear in expression, I am certain that I see everything that is seen and in between I stand around but I do not wait, no American can wait he can stand around and do nothing but he cannot wait, that is why he is not like Milton who served by standing and waiting, Americans can neither serve nor wait, they can stand and sit down and get up and walk around but they can neither serve nor wait."

"I think the reason I am important is that I know everything."

"If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised."

"I wish to remain to remember that stanzas go on"

"If nobody knows you that does not argue that you be unknown, nobody knew Ida when they no longer lived in Boston but that did not mean that she was unknown."

"I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear readers, are an after-thought."

"If everyone were not so indolent they would realize that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic."

"If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire."

"If the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does anything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything."

"If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles."