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Memorable lines 2007
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Jim Agnew-The Literary World © 2008 Home | Links | Notes | Contact | Memorable Lines | Archives | Events |
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"Until
you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have."
"The
literary masterpieces of the twentieth century were for the most part the work
of novelisis who had no large public in mind. The novels of Proust and Joyce
were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the
blaze and dazzle of popularity."
"Fair
play is primarily not blaming others for anything that is wrong with us."
"Be
able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude."
"Everything
that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
Trust
yourself. You know more than you think you do.
"The
house of fiction has not one window, but a million...but they are, singly or
together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher."
"If you
can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one."
"All
men by nature desire to know."
"The young man's eyes had the opal lightings of dark oil and...fed too strongly
inward to draw to a focus: whereas those of the young woman had each the
splendor of a monstrance, and were brass."
"She
turned on the steps to look back at me before descending into a jasmine-scented,
cricket-mad dusk of a small train station."
"During
the early morning hours of March 20, 1954, Mosconi completed a run of 526 balls.
Again, that's 5-2-6. It represented at least thirty-four racks of straight pool
and maybe more, depending on how one does the counting. It is a record that has
remained standing for more than five decades, and, in fact, may never ever be
surpassed. It is pool's most cherished record and in all ways as startling as
DiMaggio's fifty-six-game hitting streak, or the hundred-point game by Wilt
Chamberlain."
"Hermes
is the God of signposts: i.e., he is, specially for a traveller like Ulysses,
the point at which roads parallel merge and roads contrary also. He is an
accident of providence."
It
takes two to speak the truth--one to speak and another to hear."
"It
is easy to work when the soul is at play."
I
learnt that politics is not only action but participation, it is not a matter of
changing men but accompanying them, being one of them."
"I first met
film director Sam Peckinpah some 20 years ago when he expressed a desire to film my
novel 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'..
"What
do we know / But that we face / One another in this place."
"No
man can write who is not first a humanitarian."
"By
seven I was in the desolation of the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potato skins
and bones and fishtails stuck together in their grease waiting littered on the
floor, and a pile of plates, stuck together in their grease, waiting from
overnight."
"A
poem begins as a lump in the throat."
"Two
of the more truthful statements in recent culture are that we need a little help
from our friends, and that sometimes we must depend on the kindness of
strangers. If you don't know those two things and accept them, you will end up
in a bus of one kind or another."
"Everything
a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from
his need or drive to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has
nothing to say."
"I
believe that the essay remains the artistic form in which consciousness achieves
its fullest expression."
"The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the
circumference is nowhere."
"We
make a living by what we earn--we make a life by what we give."
"At
the king's desperate invitation, an American geologist, Karl Twitchell, had
arrived in April of that same year to probe for water and gold. He would find
neither, but he did think there was some potential for oil."
"I'm,
really not ordinarily so much of a busybody as you probably think," she said
gaily. "But you're so excessively secretive that I can't help being curious. You
aren't a bootlegger, are you? Donald changes them so often."
"Organizing
is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all
mixed up"
Fear
has become rampant in our culture. It dominants our minds as well as our media.
Fear is responsible for all hatred, wars, greed, and other subhuman qualities.
It is also used as a tool of manipulation by those wishing to keep us frightened
as a means of staying in power. We have no shortage of reasons to eliminate fear
in our world.
"On the
issues that have come to define the modern Christian right, the students at
Patrick Henry generally cleave to orthodoxy. During my year and a half on
campus, I never heard any student argue that homosexuality is not a sin, or that
abortion should be allowed in any circumstances. I heard people criticize Bush,
but only from the right."
"I
will never forget Carmel Snow for that. I learned enough in one day about how to
handle my job for Tiffany, sitting by Mrs. Elizabeth Penrose Hawkins (the
woman's editor of The New York Times), to substitute for three years in
journalism school."
"Sometimes
the path to a criminal personality can't be easily explained; the factors that
determine one's character defy reason.".
"By
far the most enthusiastic review (For Whom The Bell Tolls) of the day was
Dorothy Parker's for PM. In her conclusion, Parker stated, 'I think that what
you do about this book of Ernest Hemingway's is to point to it and say, 'Here is
a book.' As you would stand below Everest and say, 'Here is a mountain."""
Billy Graham: Well, there's a block that I
see in people all the time that is far greater than the intellectual block. It's
the unwillingwess of people to commit themselves to the high moral demands of
Christ. This is the most common block of all: people who just cannot say to
Christ, "You will be Lord of all in my life, and I will stop doing anything that
I know You would not want me to do."
"One
day I made two lists: all the things I was scared of and all the things I wasn't
scared of. I wrote down even the littlest things. I was scared of the toaster. I
wasn't scared of the toast. After a while it was fun and I started laughing.
Writing these lists helped me relieve my fears and I discovered a lot about
myself."
"I prefer the man to
the artist. Cezanne was not an artist, but Manet was. If you follow me." ---
Georges Braque
Introduction..."In the forty years it took me to write this book, I only
gradually realized that the finished work, if it were going to be true to the
pattern of my experience, would have no pattern. It would be organized like the
top of my desk, from which the last assistant I hired to sort it out has yet
appeared. The book I wanted to write had its origins in the books I was reading.
Several times, in my early days, I had to sell my best books for food, so I
never underlined anything. When conditions improved I became less fastidious.
Not long after I began marking passages for future consideration. I began
keeping notes in the margin beside the markings, and then longer notes on the
endpapers. Those were the very means Montaigne invented the modern essay, and at
first I must have had an essay of my own in mind, but one with the usual shape,
a single line of argument moving through selected perceptions to a neat
conclusion."
"The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in
order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in
an attention-deficit culture. We are bombarded with more and more information on
television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant supply
of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for
something new and fabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing exciting is
going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look
for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these
rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound fish, floating along a two-dimensional
world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societal
induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating
effect."
"He
and his anonymous friend, taking into account all the Scotland Yard suspects and
at least two additional suspects from Scotland Yard, deduced the murderer; each
wrote a name on a piece of paper; put the paper in an envelope; and then
exchanged envelopes. Evidently both men had the same name (never revealed!). Dr.
Bell immediately notified Scotland Yard. A week later, the murders came to an
end. Was this coincidence? Did Dr. Bell and his unnamed friend have something to
do with solving the case--or stopping the canage? The answer will never be
known, just as Jack the Ripper has never been positively identified. Sherlock
Holmes, as literary creation, was not yet a year old." 
"The cold war came to broadcasting in 1950. In that year, just as the Korean War
was about to erupt, there appeared from a small publisher a booklet called "Red
Channels", which listed 151 suspected Communist sympathizers in broadcasting.
Within months, the blacklist in radio and TV began."
"My religion Is very simple. My religion Is kindness." The Dalai Lama.
"Find something
you are good at and be willing to work hard at it."
"That evening, the last time I saw him alive, we just drank and talked as usual.
He was the perfect drinking buddy: uninhibited, creative in conversation,
inventive in mimicry, erudite in the range of his knowledge. Some of what he
said was trash, but some was the fruit of his genius. I remember only a little
of what we talked about that night. It was, as, usual, mostly about his boyhood,
and about writers and writing."
"Far more prescient was an article Lawrence published in the Sunday
Times in August 1920 in words that might have been directed to British prime
minister Tony Blair eighty-four years later: 
"Ignoring
the gladhanders, dignitaries, and Beatle business manager Allen Klein, Lennon
and Doc talked the entire night--about Phil Spector, who'd been producing John
and Yoko's records, about how Lennon and Paul McCartney has used part of the
melody from "Save the Last Dance for Me" in "Hey Jude" but mostly politics."
from Lonely Avenue by Alex Halberstadt (Da Capo Press)
"White Heat" may be the first modern action thriller, as its structure and
content prefigure today's ultra-violent escapist entertainments, with their
multiple climaxes and heightened brutality. "White Heat" expresses a highly
unstable world in which familiar gangster themes rush toward a literally
explosive climax. The racketeer with a gun has mutated into an Oedipal madman
who would gladly blow up the entire world to serve as his funeral pyre."White Heat": I am Cody Jarrett, Destroyer of Worlds by Glenn
Erickson from Gangster Film Reader, edited by Alain Silver & James Ursini
(Limelight Editions).
You're
wrong about Ernest's presence being a help. He wasn't present except in the
flesh. He needed me to run his house and to copulate on (I use the adverb
advisedly, not with but on) and to provide exercise in the way of a daily
tennis game. There wasn't any fun or communication, none. When I thought I'd
go mad from the loneliness and boredom, I slipped off to war: four times. To
live at all, I had to write. I had to stay there for months at a time. and
after I'd got over the usual agonies of houserunning, I wrote. He
enforced discipline because he was himself totally immersed in For Whom The
Bell Tolls; so I had to make stories for myself. Selected Letters Of Martha Gellhorn...edited by Caroline Moorehead
(Henry Holt And Company) page 412-13...letter to Betsy Drake, May 8, 1974.
Welles
was an early sufferer from the condition that the Yogoslavian film-maker
Dusan Makavejev has described as "projectitis". His fertility in engendering
ideas was astounding. He was able to conceive an entire film within minutes;
in the incubator of his mind, the germ of the idea rapidly grew to
full-fledged maturity, demanding to be announced immediately. Once, exposed
to the light of common day, the project would, generally speaking, and in
the nature of things, almost immediately expire. In 1940, Welles told the
press that he was going to film the "Life of Christ, though he modestly
demurred from saying who would be playing the title role; in 1942, he
proclaimed that he would be filming "Mein Kampf". This time no inhibition
prevented his claiming the part of Hitler. Of neither project, divine or
diabolic, was another word ever heard. Some forty or so other properties
were considered, encompassing the peaks of world literature, from Balzac to
Mark Twain, and all, for one reason or another, discarded.Orson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow (Viking) page 7.
Just
as Helen Dukas managed to define my life's trajectory simply by handing me
the right book, I believe she guided Einstein's life by a series of subtle
hints. The day-to-day routine of saying, "Here, read this," or "I think we
should answer this letter" (while discarding others), concealed a deep
understanding on her part of Einstein's place in the world. She allowed
Einstein to be Einstein. Her instincts were as infallible and
straightforward as a magnetic compass, and Einstein needed this.
On
any given day, four to five convoys were in motion on the sea, heading for
Britain or returning to America. They were huge. It took about two weeks for
a convoy to cross. A typical convoy had forty ships in it, arranged in eight
columns, each five rows deep. There were 1,000 yards between columns, 400 to
600 yards between a ship and the ones ahead and behind her. When fully
spread out on the face of the sea, each flotilla covered a tremendous area,
perhaps twelve or fifteen square miles. 
On
the set the day shooting commenced on the final courtroom scene, Rand was
shocked to hear that Vidor had shortened Roark's speech. Infuriated, Rand
told producer Henry Blanke that she would disassociate herself from the film
if the speech were cut. Wrote Michael Paxton in his biography of Rand, "Gary
Cooper's lawyer and the Johnston office censors were concerned about the
uncompromising principles of Roark's individualism. Neither was able to
justify their objections, and their questions only prompted Ayn to lengthen
the speech for clarity. Increased from four and a half to six and a half
minutes, Cooper would now deliver the longest speech in the history of
film...It was truly unprecedented. The speech and her script were filmed
without one single word changed.
Along
with the other convicts sentenced to do time in the second-oldest
penitentiary in the state, Tim rode on a bus with barred windows through the
shimmering heat of the Central Valley in May, 1973. Inside the
ninety-three-year-old stone dungeon that was Folsom Prison, he was stripped
and searched, given a tattered gray jumpsuit and oversize cloth slippers
and, and told to pick out a mattress. Guards with clubs hanging from their
wrists escorted him along the bottom tier of 4-A, the prison's adjustment
center. Just before Tim got off the bus, one of his fellow cons told him,
"Folsom is the asshole of the prison system and 4-A is the bottom of that."
Where
Grant truly excelled was in his understanding of the troops under his
command. They were of quite a different sort from those of the prewar army,
where in general soldiers were soldiers because they were unfit for any
honest work. The men on both sides of the civil war were a reasonable cross
section of society, civilians who had put on a uniform. They had to be
treated accordingly, and Grant's modesty, his disregard for pomp and brass,
stood him in good stead, even though it was not an act. Lee entered the war
already a legend, but Grant became one owing to his generalship. As Lee
himself put it: "I have carefully searched the military records of both
ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant's superior as a
general."