Great Throughts Treasury

"Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Because your eyes are slant and slow, because your hair is sweet to touch, my heart is high again; but oh, I doubt if this will get me much." - Dorothy Parker

"Let no one honor me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me." - Ennius, fully Quintus Ennius NULL

"Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom explicitly recognizes egoboo (the enhancement of one's reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity." - Eric S. Raymond

"Do you know that in about thirty-five more years we'll be dead? What the hell, Robert, I said. What the hell. I'm serious. ItÂ’s one thing I don't worry about, I said. You ought to. I've had plenty to worry about one time or other. I'm through worrying. Well, I want to go to South America. Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that. But you've never been to South America. South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same. This is a good town. Why don't you start living your life in Paris?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I wondered... if there should be anything wrong with Sen. Joe McCarthy (Republican) of Wisconsin which a .577 solid would not cure." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Look very small those obstacles which seemed a very big day." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how -- with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means -- he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"If that ghost have money I tells him never to haunt you -- less'n he wants to lose it!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"At the door of the dining-room he left us. 'Good night, Mr Jorkins,' he said. 'I hope you will pay us another visit when you next cross the herring pond.' 'I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think I was American.' 'He's rather odd at times." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"Just the place to bury a crock of gold. I should like to bury something precious, in every place I've been happy. And then when I was old, and ugly and miserable, I could come back, and dig it up, and remember." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"Life is like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all around, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh too. It's great fun. You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There's generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he's paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he's allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it; I'm not very near that point myself. Of course the professional men get in the way. Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others, like Margot, who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone. People don't see that when they say life they mean two different things. They can mean simply existence, with its physiological implications of growth and organic change. They can't escape that - even by death, but because that's inevitable they think the other idea of life is too - the scrambling and excitement and bumps and the effort to get to the middle, and when we do get to the middle, it's just as if we never started. It's so odd. Now you're a person who was clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still and if you get bored watch the others. Somehow you got on to the wheel, and you got thrown off again at once with a hard bump. It's all right for Margot, who can cling on, and for me, at the centre, but you're static. Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. There's a real distinction there, though I can't tell you how it comes. I think we're probably two quite different species spiritually." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I'm reading biographies of Mahler." - Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra

"And in the darkness bind them." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien