Quotes

There is shadow under this red rock,

You know only

Winter kept us warm, covering

In the mountains, there you feel free.

Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool,

Odors, confected by the cunning French,

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art.

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult . . . . The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

He shall be washed as white as snow,

It [tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye

And even the Abstract Entities

I am moved by fancies that are curled

The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

He laughed like an irresponsible fetus.

The winter evening settles down

Do I dare

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land—if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

Might, could, would—they are contemptible auxiliaries.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Correct English is the slang of prigs.

He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.

There’s allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himself, and there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him. There’d be two ’pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.

The greatest invention of mankind is compound interest.

I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.

[ Remark to Philippe Halsman :] When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.

Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct anyway.

[ From an autobiographical handwritten note :] Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.

Why do people speak of great men in terms of nationality? Great Germans, great Englishmen? Goethe always protested against being called a German poet. Great men are simply men and are not to be considered from the point of view of nationality, nor should the environment in which they were brought up be taken into account.

[ Response to being asked why people could discover atoms but not the means to control them :] That is simple, my friend: because politics is more difficult than physics.

The most important aspect of our [Israel’s] policy must be our ever-present, manifest desire to institute complete equality for the Arab citizens living in our midst. . . . The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.

It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late, so that they even consulted a doctor. I can’t say how old I was—but surely not less than three.

Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify. . . . This kind of inquisition violates the spirit of the Constitution. If enough people are ready to take this grave step they will be successful. If not, then the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.

I do not know [how the Third World War will be fought]. But I can tell you what they’ll use in the fourth—rocks!

As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.

[ On quantum theory :] It is hard to sneak a look at God’s cards. But that he would choose to play dice with the world . . . is something I cannot believe for a single moment.

We know nothing about it [God and the world] at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never.

Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster.