"Be wise to-day; ’tis madness to defer;"
--Edward Young (1683-1765), Night Thoughts
"Be wise to-day. It is madness to defer; To-morrow's caution may arrive too late."
--James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Precaution (1820)
"All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved." --English author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Ch. 1, A Room of One's Own (1929)
"A herd, as everyone knows, is composed of creatures deprived of speech and with fairly weak sphincters. It is a proven fact, moreover, that in times of confusion, the herd prefers servitude to disorder. Which is why those who behave like crazed nanny goats do not have leaders but great goatish assholes at their head." --Mario Vargas Llosa, "Letter to a Rotarian", p.112, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998)
"No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?"
"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer.
"And what is hell? Can you tell me that?"
"A pit full of fire."
"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?"
"No, sir."
"What must you do to avoid it?"
I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: "I must keep in good health, and not die." --Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847)
"ONLY A MISSIONARY"--High upon a rock, poised like a bird for flight, stark naked, his satin skin shining like gold and silver in the rising sun, stood a youth, tall, slim of body, not fully developed but with muscles promising, in their faultless, gently swelling outline, strength and suppleness to an unusual degree. Gazing down into the pool formed by an eddy of the river twenty feet below him, he stood as if calculating the distance, his profile turned toward the man who had just emerged from the bushes and was standing on the sandy strand of the river, paddle in hand, looking up at him with an expression of wonder and delight in his eyes. --Ralph Connor (pseudonym of Reverend Charles William Gordon) (1860-1937), Canadian Literature icon and Presbyterian minister, Ch. 1, The Sky Pilot In No Man's Land (1919)
"Of all evil-doers, the American is most to be feared; he uses more ingenuity in the planning of his projects, and will take greater risks in carrying them out, than any other malefactor on earth."
--Scottish-Canadian author Robert Barr (1849-1912), "The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds", The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont (1906)
"I am sorry I must disappoint you. Your impassioned arguments in favor of preserving nature and the environments do not move me. I was born, I have lived, and I will die in the city (in the ugly city of Lima, to make matters worse), and leaving the metropolis, even for a weekend, is a servitude to which I submit occasionally because of family or professional obligations, but always with distaste. Do not count me as one of those bourgeois whose fondest wish is to buy a little house on a southern beach where they can spend summers and weekends in close proximity to sand, salt, water, and the beer bellies of other bourgeois identical to themselves. This Sunday spectacle of families fraternizing beside the sea in a bien pensant exhibitionism is, in the ignoble annals of gregariousness, one of the most depressing offered by this pre-individualist country." --Mario Vargas Llosa, p.25, "Chlorophyll and Dung", The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity". --Christopher Morley (1890-1957) last message to his friends published in The New York Times.
"....the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind." --Paul Bowles, p. 100, Port, The Sheltering Sky (1949)
"Before her eyes was the violent blue sky--nothing else. ....Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. ....the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur...." ibid
--Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life (1855).
"Unhappy is the soul enslaved by the love of anything that is mortal." --Saint Augustine
"Henceforth men's eyes will be turned towards the faces not of those who are the rulers but of those who are the thinkers." --Victor Hugo at the funeral of Honore de Balzac (1850)
"If you're an introvert, you also know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain."
--Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts (2012)
"ln my life I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man's work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others." --Amelia Barr (1831-1919)
"Entering into harmonic relationships is the goal not only of music. It is the goal of atoms and molecules, of planetary orbits, of cells and hearts, of brain waves and movements, of flocks of birds and schools of fish and--in principle--human beings. All of them .... have harmony as their final goal. They are all moving to realise Nada Brahma." --Joachim Ernst Berendt on synchronicity and entrainment in The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma; music and the landscape of the unconsciousness. (1987)
"[The age of] Two is the beginning of the end." --James M. Barrie, Ch. 1, Peter Pan
"Genius is a child up to the age of ten." --Aldous Huxley
"I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp, which when caught, is not worth the possession;"
--Frank Baum, author of Wizard of Oz, The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was" (Martin Gardner, 2012)
"LITIGATION, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage."
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1881)
"I never wrote to please any of you, not even to please my own husband." "Every genuine artist in the world (whatever his degree) goes to heaven for speaking the truth."
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1860)
"To the cause of conservation of wild life and to increase of love for our little friends of the Green Forest and the Green Meadows through awakened interest in them and a better understanding of their value to us as faithful workers in carrying out the plans of wise Old Mother Nature, this little book is dedicated." --Thornton W. Burgess
"To the most beautiful of our four-footed friends in the green forest, with the hope that this little volume may, in some degree, aid in the protection of the innocent and helpless."--conservationist and extraordinary children's author Thornton W. Burgess, from his dedication to Lightfoot the Deer (1921)
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." --Aldous Huxley, from Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time by Laurence J. Peter, p. 239. 1979.
"Hell is other people." --Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit (1944)
"....having decided to replace a reproduction of Andy Warhol's multi-coloured Campbell's soup can with a beautiful Szyszlo inspired by the sea of Paracas, I realized it was stupid to inflict on other eyes a work I had come to consider unworthy of mine. And then I threw it into the fire. .... I have consigned dozens of romantic and indigenist poets to the flames, and an equal number of conceptualist, abstract, informalist, landscapist, portraitist, and sacred works of art in order to maintain the numerous clausus of my library and art collection, and I have done so not with regret but with the stimulating sense that I was engaging in literary and artistic criticism as it should be practiced: radically, irreversibly, and flammably."
--Mario Vargas Llosa, p. 9 of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
"Absurdity was not an idea in my head, or the sound of a voice, only this long serpent dead at my feet, this wooden serpent. .... I understood that I had found the key to my Existence, the key to my nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity." --Roquentin in Jean Paul Sarte's Nausea (1938)
"....I am finally unpacking the boxes from those two years in Tehran. As I sort through the clothes, peeling veil from veil, it is like tracing the rings of a tree trunk to tell its evolution. The outer layers are a wash of color, dashing tones of turquoise and frothy pink, in delicate chiffon and translucent silks. They are colors found in life--the color of pomegranates and pistachio, the sky and bright spring leaves--in fabrics that breathe. Underneath, as I dig down, there are dark, matte veils, long, formless robes in funereal tones of slate and black. That is what we wore, back in 1998. .... Parliament never officially pardoned color, sanctioned the exposure of toes and waistlines. Young women did it themselves, en masse, a slow, deliberate, widespread act of defiance. A jihad, in the classical sense of the word: a struggle." --from Azadeh Moaveni's Introduction to her memoir Lipstick Jihad (2005)
"All this was long ago, when I was still babyish and sure that everything was alive, not only the river or the rain, but the chairs, looking-glasses, cups, saucers, everything."
--Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
--Henry V (4.3.32-43)
"The robb'd that smiles, steals something from the thief."
--the Duke of Venice in Shakespeare's Othello (1.3.225-6)
"If you're an introvert, you also know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain."
--Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts (2012)
"ln my life I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man's work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others." --Amelia Barr (1831-1919)
"Entering into harmonic relationships is the goal not only of music. It is the goal of atoms and molecules, of planetary orbits, of cells and hearts, of brain waves and movements, of flocks of birds and schools of fish and--in principle--human beings. All of them .... have harmony as their final goal. They are all moving to realise Nada Brahma." --Joachim Ernst Berendt on synchronicity and entrainment in The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma; music and the landscape of the unconsciousness. (1987)
"[The age of] Two is the beginning of the end." --James M. Barrie, Ch. 1, Peter Pan
"Genius is a child up to the age of ten." --Aldous Huxley
"I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp, which when caught, is not worth the possession;"
--Frank Baum, author of Wizard of Oz, The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was" (Martin Gardner, 2012)
"LITIGATION, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage."
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1881)
"I never wrote to please any of you, not even to please my own husband." "Every genuine artist in the world (whatever his degree) goes to heaven for speaking the truth."
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1860)
"To the most beautiful of our four-footed friends in the green forest, with the hope that this little volume may, in some degree, aid in the protection of the innocent and helpless."--conservationist and extraordinary children's author Thornton W. Burgess, from his dedication to Lightfoot the Deer (1921)
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." --Aldous Huxley, from Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time by Laurence J. Peter, p. 239. 1979.
"Hell is other people." --Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit (1944)
"....having decided to replace a reproduction of Andy Warhol's multi-coloured Campbell's soup can with a beautiful Szyszlo inspired by the sea of Paracas, I realized it was stupid to inflict on other eyes a work I had come to consider unworthy of mine. And then I threw it into the fire. .... I have consigned dozens of romantic and indigenist poets to the flames, and an equal number of conceptualist, abstract, informalist, landscapist, portraitist, and sacred works of art in order to maintain the numerous clausus of my library and art collection, and I have done so not with regret but with the stimulating sense that I was engaging in literary and artistic criticism as it should be practiced: radically, irreversibly, and flammably."
--Mario Vargas Llosa, p. 9 of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
"....I am finally unpacking the boxes from those two years in Tehran. As I sort through the clothes, peeling veil from veil, it is like tracing the rings of a tree trunk to tell its evolution. The outer layers are a wash of color, dashing tones of turquoise and frothy pink, in delicate chiffon and translucent silks. They are colors found in life--the color of pomegranates and pistachio, the sky and bright spring leaves--in fabrics that breathe. Underneath, as I dig down, there are dark, matte veils, long, formless robes in funereal tones of slate and black. That is what we wore, back in 1998. .... Parliament never officially pardoned color, sanctioned the exposure of toes and waistlines. Young women did it themselves, en masse, a slow, deliberate, widespread act of defiance. A jihad, in the classical sense of the word: a struggle." --from Azadeh Moaveni's Introduction to her memoir Lipstick Jihad (2005)
"All this was long ago, when I was still babyish and sure that everything was alive, not only the river or the rain, but the chairs, looking-glasses, cups, saucers, everything."
--Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
--Henry V (4.3.32-43)
"The robb'd that smiles, steals something from the thief."
--the Duke of Venice in Shakespeare's Othello (1.3.225-6)
