COLLECTION OF PAST QUOTES: FEEL FREE TO BROWSE,
READ/SAVE YOUR FAVORITES!



From: The Once and Future King, by T.H. White..."The 
best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning
to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the
only thing that never fails. You may grow old and 
trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at 
listening to the disorder of your veins, you may 
miss your only love, you may see the world about 
you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor 
trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only 
one thing for it then, to learn. Learn why the world 
wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which 
the MIND can never exhaust, never alienate, never be 
tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream 
of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at 
what a lot of things there are to learn -- pure science, 
the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a 
lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. 
And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes 
in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography 
and history and economics -- why, then you can start to 
make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or 
spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat 
your adversary at fencing. After that, you can start again 
on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."

*********************************************************

From 'Irish Fairy Tales' Chapter IV, James Stephens:
"There is a difference between this world and the 
world of Faery, but it is not immediately perceptible. 
Everything that is here is there, but the things that 
are there are better than those that are here. All things 
that are bright are there brighter. There is more gold in 
the sun and more silver in the moon of that land. There is 
more scent in the flowers and more savour in the fruit... 
Everything in Faery is better by this one wonderful 
degree, and it is by this betterness you will know that 
you are there if you should ever happen to get there..."  
[Isn't this land of Faery like our own vivid imaginary 
powers? Some things are often better in fictional worlds 
-- or in what humans create from their imagination, like 
cyberspace.]

******************************************************

"A task without a vision is drudgery; a vision without
a task is a is a dream; a task with a vision is a
victory."     --Anonymous

*******************************************************

"Nothing can supply the plae of books. They are cheering
or soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction. 
The wealth of both continents would not compensate for
the good they do."   --Channing


****************************************************

"A house without a woman and firelight is like a
body without soul or spirit."    --Franklin

***************************************************


WHAT I HAVE LIVED FOR -- Betrand Russell: 

"Three passions, simple but ungovernably strong, 
have ruled my life. The longing for love, the search 
for wisdom and unbearable pity for the suffering of 
mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown 
me hither and thither in a wayward course, over a deep 
ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings 
ecstasy so great that I often would have sacrificed 
all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy. 
I have sought it next because it relieves loneliness, 
the terrible loneliness in which one shivering 
consciousness looks over the rim of the world into 
the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought 
it finally, because in the union of love I have seen 
in mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the 
heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is 
what I have sought, and though it may seem too good 
for human life, this is what, at last, I have found."


******************************************************

Words are instruments of music: An ignorant man uses 
them for jargon; but when a master touches them they 
have unexpected life and soul. Some words sound out 
like drums; some breathe memories sweet as flutes; 
some call like a clarionet; some show a charge like 
trumpets; some are sweet as children's talk; others 
rich as a mother's answering back.
                           --Anonymous
*****************************************************


From Ellen Gilchrist, Journal: Falling Through Space

I tell writing students that the first thing a writer 
has to do is find another source of income. Then, 
after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved 
up the money to give you time to write and you spend 
all of it staying alive while you write, and you 
write your heart out, after all of that, maybe no 
one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe 
no one will read it. That is the hard truth. This 
is what it means to be a writer. It is an exciting 
and jealous obsession.

**************************************************

From Erica Jong, How To Save Your Own Life:

"...there is no 'your poem, my poem.' There 
is no 'your line, my line.' There is the 
language, and we are its vessels. We speak 
for the mouths that can't speak, we speak 
their thoughts -- not our own. That's when 
we're writing, when we're pure. When we're 
not writing we worry about ego, ego, ego...
and the critics talk about ego, ego, ego. 
Whose by-line? Whose book? How long? 
Which prize? But the gift for language 
has no particular by-line -- just as a river 
doesn't care if it stays in a given state. 
It will flow across boundary lines, down 
mountains, from one country into another, from 
one civilization into another. The small minds 
sit there labeling, arguing about naming things, 
arguing about by-lines, but the river just keeps 
flowing...
  The river has the only rights there are. 
And the river corresponds to the rights of 
the readers. Nobody else has any authority 
at all over the river...it is only river and reader."

*********************************************************

This discovery of the complexity of human nature was
accompanied by another -- the discovery of the complexity
and irrationality of human motive, the discovery that
one could love and hate simultaneously, be honest
and cheap, be arrogant and humble, be any pair of
opposites that one had supposed to be mutually
exclusive. This, I believe, is not common knowledge
and would be incomprehensible to many. It has always
been known, of course, by the dramatists and
the novelist. It is, in fact, a knowledge far 
more disturbing to other people than to writers,
for to writers it is the grist to their mills.

                             -- Alan Paton
                          "The Challenge of Fear"
                             Saturday Review, '67



****************************************************

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.
                         -- Huneker


****************************************************

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment,
his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim
rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul
an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame
doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is
as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as
dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief
sojourning in an alien land; and after repute,
oblivion. Where, then, can man find the power
to guide and guard his steps? In one thing and
one alone: the love of knowledge.

                        --Marcus Aurelius
                           Meditations

**************************************************

The writer must be willing, above everything
else, to take chances, to risk making a fool
of himself -- or even to risk revealing the
fact he is a fool.  --Jessamyn West


****************************************************

"In his own clumsy way, the first thing a writer must do
is to love all mankind, even when he hates individual ones.
Some of the characters I've created I hate very much, but
it's not for me to judge them, to condemn them; they are
there, they are part of the scene that we all live in. 
We can't abolish evil by refusing to mention these people."
                       --William Faulkner


******************************************************

Merle Haggard, about his talent:
"Like a dear friend, it's puzzled me at times, but
never disappointed me. Like a good woman, it's given
me comfort and pleasure, and asked only respect 
and attention in return. Like a religion, it has
offered me a reason for being when other things
have slipped away. But most of all, it has become
an extension of my feelings, allowing me that little
piece of immortality everybody dreams about."


*******************************************************

From: "The Finishing School"--novel by Gail Godwin, a
character explaining what art is to the artist:
"It's a love that can never be satisfied, more like a
yearning. Addressing a powerful and constant state
of yearning that torments, yet artists love this torment.
Needs it. Because they understand that being able to
feel this yearning so exquisitely is a secret strength.
This is the power of the artist. If you are an artist
you learn how to trap the yearning and put it where
you want it, put it where it goes. That's the secret
all true artists come to know. That is the redemptive
power of art. It can make something haunting and
beautiful out of something that, in real life, was
painful and degrading."


****************************************************

The number of things just outside the perimeter of 
my financial reach remains constant no matter how 
much my financial condiditon improves. With each 
increase in my income a new perimeter forms and I 
experience the same relative sense of lack. I believe 
that I would be happy if only my earnings were 
increased by so much and I could then have or do 
these few things I can't quite afford, but when my 
income does increase I find I am still unhappy because 
from my new financial position I can now see a whole 
new set of things I don't have. The problem will be 
solved when I realize that happiness is a present 
attitude and not a future condition."
         --Hugh Prather, 'Notes to Myself'

******************************************************

"Sooner or later, every artist encounters rejection -- 
even the most famous. If you persevere a lifetime with 
your work, it must go through periods of being out of 
sync with the politics or literary theories of your time. 
And you must work past that, even if it means rejection. 
Politics change. But the time to work can never be brought 
back. Nabokov would be astonished to see his work in print 
all over Russia. He predicted that would never happen.
     Rejection from outside is always better than inwardly 
rejecting your writer-self. Your writer-self is all you 
have to deal with. If you deprive yourself of that, you 
will never come to know how ultimately unimportant outer 
rejection is. But if you ally yourself with the forces of 
rejection, you will have committed creative suicide. The 
*-----* will not only have got you down, they will have 
killed you, with your own enthusiastic complicity." 
             --Erica Jong, 'Fear of Fifty'

**********************************************************
                            
"When I was young and free and my imagination had no limits,
I dreamed of changing the world. As I grew older and wiser, 
I discovered the world would not change, so I shortened my 
sights and decided to change only my country. But it too 
seemed immovable. As I grew into my twilight years, in one 
last desperate attempt, I settled for changing only my family. 
But they would have none of it. And now, as I lie on my 
deathbed, I suddenly realize if I had only changed myself 
first, then by example, I would have changed my family. 
From their inspiration and encouragement, I would have 
been able to better my country. And who knows, I may 
have even changed the world."
                            --From the tomb of an 
                              Anglican Bishop (1100 AD)
                            in the crypts of Westminister 
                                    Abby, England