Quotes

[ Remark, 1918 :] My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

Beneath this tree lies the body of John Oakhurst, who struck a streak of bad luck on the 23rd of November, 1850, and handed in his checks on the 7th December, 1850.

The years-heired feature that can

Yonder a maid and her wight

And as the smart ship grew

Till the Spinner of the Years

[ Suicide note by a child who killed himself and two siblings :] Done because we are too menny.

Pessimism (or rather what is called such) is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.

People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.

That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward . . . and to avoid each other’s society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There’d be little cooling then.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?

Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power.

A woeful fact—that the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment. Even the higher animals are in excess in this respect. It may be questioned if Nature, or what we call nature, so far back as when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates, did not exceed her mission. This planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences.

MICHAEL HENCHARD’S WILL

Women the most delicate get used to strange moral situations. Eve probably regained her normal sweet composure about a week after the Fall.

If a woman did not invariably form an opinion of her choice before she has half seen him, and love him before she has half formed an opinion, there would be no tears and pining in the whole feminine world, and poets would starve for want of a topic.

There is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.

Anybody’s life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the difference is, that the last chapter is wanting in the story.

Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a man hasn’t sense enough to know whom to despise.

Good, but not religious-good.

The difference between a common man and a recognized poet is, that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other continues deluded all his days.

Nought availed; I was dying helplessly, with my eyes wide open—staring straight up at the roof. At length, I stuck my forefinger in my mouth, and took to sucking it. Something stirred in my brain, a thought that bored its way in there—a stark-mad notion. Supposing I were to take a bite? And without a moment’s reflection, I shut my eyes, and clenched my teeth on it. I sprang up. At last I was thoroughly awake.

In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library burning.

It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiana: Christiana, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there.

I don’t know Who—or what—put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.

In a revolution, one either triumphs or dies.

Dos, tres . . . muchos Vietnam .

Revolution that does not constantly become more profound is a regressive revolution.

The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.

He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American.

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?

Sweet is the breath of vernal shower,

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

For me, the naked and the nude

The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen bee whose embrace is death.

Tell me, my witless, whose one boast

Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

As you are woman, so be lovely:

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

You can declare at the very start that it’s impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your back, so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels.

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.