Quotes

The water never formed to mind or voice,

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

It did not give of bird or bush,

I know of only one rule: style cannot be too clear , too simple .

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

La politique au milieu des intérêts d’imagination, c’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert . Politics in the middle of things concerning the imagination are like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

Un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route .

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. . . . An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.

Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas comeup an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin’.

Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people—we go on.

Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself, it’s the way they say it.

[ Remark, 1925 :] The Jews have produced only three originative geniuses; Christ, Spinoza, and myself.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

[ Of Ernest Hemingway :] Anyone who marries three girls from St. Louis hasn’t learned much.

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

It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded.

[ Of Ezra Pound :] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

They were regular in being gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, they learned many little things that are things in being gay, they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.

There are no small parts, there are only small actors.

[ Remark upon being informed that the United States had developed the atom bomb :] Well, that’s fine. Let’s use it. What’s the next item on the agenda?

In case of a forced retreat of Red Army units, all rolling stock must be evacuated; to the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain or a gallon of fuel. . . . In occupied regions conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his accomplices. They must be hounded and annihilated at every step and all their measures frustrated.

[ When asked by French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval to encourage Catholicism in the Soviet Union in order to appease the Pope, 13 May 1935 :] The Pope? How many divisions has he got?

History shows that there are no invincible armies.

You are engineers of human souls.

I have taken great care not to deride, bewail, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Deus, sive Natura .

To bring aid to everyone in need far surpasses the powers and advantage of a private person. . . . So the case of the poor falls upon society as a whole.

The law is the survival of the fittest . . . . The law is not the survival of the “better” or the “stronger,” if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

Of Human Bondage.

Progress . . . is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature.

Every active force produces more than one change—every cause produces more than one effect.

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, “social justice.”

But the skin of progress

Someone asked Sophocles, “How is your sex-life now? Are you still able to have a woman?” He replied, “Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.”

The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the slaves of their households. They no longer rise when an elder enters the room, they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up the dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize over their pedagogues.

The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.

[ “Last words” :] Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.