"Today, I saw a red and yellow sunset, and thought how insignificant I am. Of course, I thought that yesterday, too, and it rained."
— From Woody Allen’s collection Without Feathers
December 18, 2011
October 29, 2011
October 3, 2011
"Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"
— From Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair”
September 29, 2011
"Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language."
— from Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog
June 15, 2011
"All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?"
— I.i (“Supplemental Rationality”) in Daybreak by Friedrich Nietzsche
(Source: goodreads.com)
June 15, 2011
"What is astonishing in the realm of science is the opposite of what is astonishing in the art of the conjurer. For the latter wants to persuade us to see a very simple causality where, in truth, a very complicated causality is at work. Science, on the contrary, compels us to abandon belief in simple causalities precisely where everything seems so easy to comprehend and we are the fools of appearance. The ‘simplest’ things are very complicated — a fact at which one can never cease to marvel!"
— I.vi (“The conjurer and his opposite”) in Daybreak by Friedrich Nietzsche
(Source: goodreads.com)
June 12, 2011
"There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human affairs, and that is: Science wielded by love. Without science, love is powerless; without love, science is destructive."
— From Education of Character by Bertrand Russell
May 7, 2011
"When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab Does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, ‘This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.’ […] Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?"
— G.K. Chesterton, from The Napoleon of Notting Hill
May 7, 2011
"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
— G.K. Chesterton, from The Napoleon of Notting Hill
May 5, 2011
"Aimée Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind—the objects which barked the intruder’s shins—had been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product, but the spirit—ah, the spirit was something apart; it had to be sought afar; not here in the musky orchards of the Hesperides, but in the mountain air of the dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Hellas. An umbilical cord of cafés and fruit shops, of ancestral shady businesses (fencing and pimping) united Aimée, all unconscious, to the high places of her race. As she grew up the only language she knew expressed fewer and fewer of her ripening needs; the facts which littered her memory grew less substantial; the figure she saw in the looking-glass seemed less recognizably herself. Aimée withdrew herself into a lofty and hieratic habitation."
— Evelyn Waugh, from The Loved One
March 3, 2011
"‘I will love you forever, Axel, to the end of the world. I give myself to you now and forever. I will be faithful to you always. I rejoice that you exist, that I have met you, that I can touch you, that we live in the same century. I will never cease to bless you for my good fortune.’ Simon could not prevent himself from saying such things constantly. They burst out of him as a paean of thanksgivings at his phenomenal luck in having discovered Axel and at finding that where he loved he also was loved. Axel smiled. Occasionally he said ‘Good’ or ‘You do that’ or ‘That’s all right then’, and pulled Simon’s hair. Sometimes he said ‘Oh do shut up, Simon. It means nothing.’ Simon was not good at Axel’s moods, whose principle he could not understand. Axel was often gloomy without explanations, and very occasionally made Simon distraught with tenderness and anxiety by bursting into tears. We *feel* life so differently, thought Simon. Oh what agony it is, he thought, to love somebody so much and not *be* him."
— From Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Asterisks added to mark where italics were within the original text.
February 15, 2011
"We are voluptuaries of the morning after."
— From “Holding Course” by Seamus Heaney, within The Haw Lantern
February 13, 2011
"That was the way Violet saw to leave her pain behind. A weight gone off her. If she would bow down and leave her old self behind as well, and all her ideas of what her life should be, the weight, the pain, the humiliation would all go magically. And she could still be chosen. She could be like the June grass that the morning light passed through, and lit up like pink feathers or streaks of sunrise cloud. If she prayed enough and tried enough, that would be possible."
— From “A Queer Streak” by Alice Munro (within A Progress of Love)
February 9, 2011
"When I was away from her, I could not think what my mother’s face was like, and this frightened me. Sitting in school, just over a hill from home, I would try to picture my mother’s face. Sometimes I thought that if I couldn’t do it, that might mean my mother was dead. But I had a sense of her all the time, and would be reminded of her by the most unlikely things—an upright piano, or a tall white loaf of bread. That’s ridiculous, but true."
— From The Progress of Love by Alice Munro
February 4, 2011
"Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose."
— From The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
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