Memorable Lines from 2009:

Dec. 30:

"If it sounds good, it is good."

...Duke Ellington...
 

Dec. 28:

 
"One day I was in my office, reading my New York Daily News, when Bill appeared. We looked at each other. It was late morning. Neither of us spoke. We went outside, got into a taxi, and, still without a word, went directly to the Plaza Hotel, got a pretty room, went to bed and stayed there for the rest of the day and evening. Everything between us was so natural, so easy, there wasn't anything to say about it. It seemed that we had been together for years."

...Lillian Ross...Here But Not Here: A Love Story...
 

Dec. 23:

 
"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

...Red Sanders...UCLA football coach...
 

Dec. 21:

"Don't trust anyone over 30."

...Jack Weinberg...
 

Dec. 18:

 
"One cannot capture the tiger cubs unless he risks going into the tiger's den."

...Mao...
 

Dec. 16:

"Solitude is an unavoidable condition of the underground. Throughout the years of the revolt I had to deny myself almost entirely the pleasure of friendly chats, of meetings with friends, or relatives or acquaintances. The law of the underground forbade "non-essential" meetings. The few people I saw came to discuss the work of the organization, our relations with other nations, questions affecting the struggle."

...Menachem Begin...The Revolt...
 

Dec. 14:

 
"The one experience I shall never describe."

...Virginia Woolf on suicide...
 

Dec. 11:

"But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don't ever call me a
Polack!"


...Tennessee Williams...A Streetcar Named Desire...
 

Dec. 9:

"Omit unnecessary words."

...William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White...The Elements Of Style...
 

Dec. 7:

"When misfortune comes, it comes not as a solitary spy but in legions."

...William Shakespeare...Hamlet...
 

Dec. 4:

People have made me a man whom I do not recognize...Dreadful, to meet this being in the street."

...Cocteau...

Dec. 2:

"He was sober everywhere except in the deepest recess of his heart. Do not take from him the only religion he has ever had, the worship of himself or of fate."

...Eduard Morike...Maler Nolten...
 

Nov. 30:

"Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Winston Churchill, 1943.
 

Nov. 25:

"One sees clearly only with the heart,
Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."

...Antoine de Saint-Exupery...The Little Prince...
 

Nov. 23:

"Life's...a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

...William Shakespeare...Macbeth...
 

Nov. 20:

"When I wake up in the morning I can't decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day."

...E.B. White...
 

Nov. 18:

Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."

...Kurt Vonnegut...
 

Nov. 16:

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

...Susan B. Anthony...
 

Nov. 13:

"Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

...Harper Lee...To Kill A Mockingbird...
 

Nov. 11:

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

...William Shakespeare...A Midsummer Night's Dream...
 

Nov. 9:

"You see, Carter, people are two things, greedy and cruel."

...Robert Cormier...The Chocolate War...
 

Nov. 6:

"But the past is passed, why moralize upon it? Forget it.
See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea,
and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves."

...Herman Melville...Benito Cereno...
 

Nov. 4:

"Life Is a game. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules."

...J.D. Salinger...The Catcher In The Rye...
 

Nov. 2:

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

...James Joyce...Ulysses...
 

Oct. 30:

"We do not remember days; we remember moments."

...Cesare Pavese...The Burning Brand...
 

Oct. 28:

"The trick is growing up without growing old."

...Casey Stengel...
 

Oct. 26:

"Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play."

...Friedrich Nietzsche...
 

Oct. 23:

"The best-educated human being is the one who understands most about the life he is placed."

...Helen Keller...

Oct. 21:

"Conscience is God's presence in man."

...Emanuel Swedenborg...

 

Oct. 19:

"The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn."

...Laurence J. Peters...
 

Oct. 16:

"We are tired, tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression."

...Martin Luther King...
 

Oct. 14:

"A farm is not a farm without a barn."

...Amish Proverb...
 

Oct. 12:

 
"I want to leave today for the island of Cuba, which I believe to be Japan...The Indians...say it is very large and has people there with one eye in the forehead, as well as others they call cannibals...I also understand that, a long distance from here, there are men with one eye and others with dog's snouts who eat men."

...FROM THE LOGBOOK OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS...
 

Oct. 9:

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."

...George Bernard Shaw...
 

Oct. 7:

"I never learned anything at school."

...Stanley Kubrick...
 

Oct. 5:

"Life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish and short."

...Thomas Hobbes...17th-century English philosopher...
 

Oct. 2:

"Much that is natural, to the will must yield.
Men manufacture both machine and soul
And use what they imperfectly control
To dare a future from the taken routes.

...from On The Move...Thom Gunn's best known poem...
 

Sept. 30:

"From now on, forget happiness. Now it's just about saving the remains, the wreakage, the appearance."

...Henry Ibsen...A Doll's House...
 

Sept. 28:

"Above all, do not lie to yourself."

...Fyodor Dostoevsky...The Brothers Karamazov...
 

Sept. 25:

"Marriage drinks up all of our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love."

...George Eliot...Middlemarch...
 

Sept. 23:

"In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred,' as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before."

...Edgar Allen Poe..."Poe's Short Stories...
 

Sept. 21:

"How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"

...Sylvia Plath...The Bell Jar...
 

Sept. 18:

"Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor."

...Sandra Cisneros...The House On Mango Street...
 

Sept. 16:

"If you are going to change the world, start with the children."

...Gandhi...
 

Sept. 14:

"Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this."

...Nevil Shute...On The Beach...

Sept. 11:

"Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between two people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends."

...Tobias Wolfe...This Boy's Life...
 

Sept. 9:

"I understand. Natural to want a bit more once you've had that first taste...but see here, young man, you can't start flying cars to try and get yourself noticed."

...J.K. Rowling...Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets...
 

Sept. 2:

"Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner."

...August Wilson...Fences...
 

Aug. 31:

Aug. 28:

"He who learns must suffer and even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

...Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way...
 

Aug. 26:

"I do to others what they do to me, only worse."


...Jimmy Hoffa to Bobby Kennedy during their first meeting over dinner...
 

Aug. 24:

"I do know a few good P.R. men, but I think most of them just stay true to the pledge they made to their mothers, that they'll never work for a living."

...Roy Cohn...
 

Aug. 21:

"When you go on the bench, any bench, from magistrate's court to the Supreme Court, you'd better call'em as you see 'em. Or get out."

...Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas...
 

Aug. 19:

"To desire and expect nothing for oneself...is genuine holiness."

...Spring Torrents...Ivan Turgenev...
 

Aug. 17:

"Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

.....Through The Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There...Lewis Carroll.....
 

Aug. 14:

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him."

.....Sentimental Education.....Gustave Flaubert..
 

Aug. 12:

"Hatred Was Bound To Come."

...Therese Raquin...Emile Zola...
 

Aug. 10:

"The more conscious I was of goodness and all that was 'sublime and beautiful,' the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether."

...Notes From The Underground...Fyodor Dostoevsky...
 

Aug. 7:

"The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies."

...Bleak House...Charles Dickens...
 

Aug. 5:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life..."

.....Walden...Henry David Thoreau...

Aug. 3:

"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."

.....Adam Bede...George Eliot...
 

July 31:

"Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offense against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness..."

...The Woman In White... Wilkie Collins...
 

July 29:

"If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself; that's where it is."

...The Mill On The Floss...George Eliot...
 

July 27:

"I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death."

...Great Expectations...Charles Dickens...
 

July 24:

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."

...The Hobbit...J.R.R. Tolkien...

July 22:

"He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness."

...The Count Of Monte Cristo...Alexander Dumas...

July 20:

"I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars."

...The Old Man And The Sea...Ernest Hemingway...
 

July 17:

"The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not."
 

...J.G. Ballard wrote Empire Of The Sun...

July 15:

"All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes."

...The Women's Room by Marilyn French...
 

July 13:

"The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable."

...Rahm Emanuel to his West Wing staff...NYT's 6/7/2009...

July 10:

Memorable Lines

"The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time."

...In The Hub Of The Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003.
 

July 8:

"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more un-sustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

...Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte...
 

July 1:

"I walked over to the stage and found Francis sitting on the big sofa in Michael Corleone's living room. We talked while the crew set up the shot on the main stairway. Francis was very depressed. He spoke so convincingly about all the things wrong in his life: how he hated that he was doing the same thing again that he had done nearly twenty years ago, hated the process of making movies, all the time it took. The only thing he liked about filmmaking was the technology. He talked about his family. He complained about me. I sat there while he ran it all out, not agreeing and not yielding to the temptation to defend anyone, just trying to be there for him. When Francis was called to the camera first position I went for a walk outside. I tried to visualize all his dark words draining out of me, dripping off the ends of my fingers and running out my toes through my shoes. I tried to feel myself filling up with sunlight."

...Eleanor Coppola...Notes On A Life (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
 

June 29:

"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

...F. Scott Fitzgerald...

June 26:

""Nelson liked killing for killing's sake. He was diabolical in appearance and grinned when he killed. Because of his brutality, his sadistic delight in the sheer joy of killing, he stands in a class by himself."

...Melvin Purvis on George "Baby Face" Nelson---real name Lester Gillis...from The Vendetta: Special Agent Melvin Purvis, John Dillinger, And Hoover's FBI In The Age Of Gangsters by Alston Purvis and Alex Tresniowski (Public Affairs)
 

June 24:

"There are people so vivid in life that they seem not to disappear when they die, and for many weeks I found myself having to come about and force myself to encounter the fact that Marilyn had ended. I realized that I still, even then, expected to meet her once more, somewhere, sometime, and maybe talk sensibly about all the foolishness we had been through--in which case I would probably have fallen in love with her again."

...Arthur Miller...Timebends: A Life...
 

June 22:

"Of course we argue sometimes. Marriage is a long journey in close quarters. Of course nerves get frayed. Every married person is a Jekyll and Hyde, they've got to be."

...Iris Murdoch...The Black Prince...
 

June 19:

"I wasn't meant to be good."

...Edith Wharton...The House Of Mirth...
 

June 17:

"Now is the winter of our discontent."

...William Shakespeare...Richard III...
 

June 15:

"Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie!...Oh, be careful--if you breathe, it breaks!"

...Tennessee Williams...The Glass Men...
 

June 12:

Nothing unknown is knowable."

...Tony Kushner...Angels In America...
 

June 10:

"The relation between the white and black race in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes."

...Isak Dinesen...Out Of Africa...
 

June 8:

Memorable Lines

"After all, there's no turning back the clock now. One can't be forevever dwelling on what might have been."

...Kazuo Ishiguro...The Remains Of The Day...
 

June 5:

"Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputabilty to the gentleman of leisure."

...Thorstein Veblen...The Theory Of The Leisure Class...
 

June 3:

"The voice of the sea is seductive."

..Kate Chopin...The Awakening...
 

June 1:

Memorable Lines

"Every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state."

...Sigmund Freud...The Dream Work...
 

May 29:

"Once I knew only darkness and stillness...but a little word from the fingers of another...and my heart leaped to the rapture of living."

...Helen Keller...The Story Of My Life...
 

May 27:

"When you call me that, smile!"

...Owen Wister...The Virginian...
 

May 25:

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."

...Booker Taliaferro Washington...Up From Slavery...
 

May 22:

"When the moral fiber of a community erodes, it is the poets who have to stand up and establish some kind of moral contact."

...T.S. Eliot...
 

May 20:

"A truly heroic actress. She inhabits a dilemma and fills it with bountiful humanity. I don't know for whom she plays--her father maybe...maybe God...but she isn't just performing for the people in the house."

...Joseph Anthony on Kim Stanley...
 

May 18:

"It may seem foolish to say, but television, the scorned stepchild of drama, may well be the basic theatre of our century."

...Paddy Chayefsky, 1953...
 

May 15:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

...Vladimir Nabokov...Lolita...
 

May 13:

"All alone it rose and looked across the marshes to the forest. The Lonely Mountain! Bilbo had come far and through many adventures to see it, and now he did not like the look of it in the least."

...J.R.R. Tolkien...The Hobbit...
 

May 11:

"We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts."

...Erich Maria Remarque...All Quiet On The Western Front...
 

May 8:

Middlemarch is one of the few English novels written for grownup people."

....Virginia Wolf on George Eliot...
 

May 6:

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'

....Henry David Thoreau...
 

May 4:

"I spent a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the god-like attributes; that of giving it."

....Ernest Hemingway...
 

May 1:

"Everybody's got something to hide except me and my monkey."

....John Lennon...

April 29:

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

....Sigmund Freud...
 

April 27:

"All evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick."

....Herman Melville...Moby-Dick...
 

April 24:

"The flowers never stopped blooming...and the air was forever filled with their scent."

....Leon Uris on Israel...
 

April 22:

"You are all a lost generation."

....Gertrude Stein...

April 20:

"My destiny is not yet accomplished. I want to complete what has only been sketched out. I want a European Code, a European Court of Appeals, the same currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws. I must make all the nations of Europe one nation..."

....Napolean Bonaparte...
 

April 17:

"It was really George Eliot who started it all. It was she who started putting action inside."

....D.H. Lawrence...

April 15:

"I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."

.....Henry David Thoreau...
 

April 13:

"Owing to their imperfect education, the only works we have had from women are works of genius."

....Charlotte Bronte...

April 10:

"It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?"

.....J.M. Barrie to H.G. Wells
 

April 8:

"What it all means I cannot guess, but there is some secret business going on in this house of gloom which sooner or later we shall get to the bottom of."

.....Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound Of The Baskervilles...
 

April 6:

"I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry."

.....Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice...
 

April 3:

"When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul--then my heart bleeds. life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness."

....Dostoevsky...letter to his brother...
 

April 1:

Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am souless and heartless? You think wrong!"

....Charlotte Bronte...Jane Eyre...
 

March 30:

"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me?"

....Milton's... Paradise Lost...
 

March 27:

"There is no there there."

....Gertrude Stein...
 

March 25:

"The humanest love knows no sect."

....Emma Wolf...
 

March 23:

"We Americans know and we observe the difference between world leadership and imperialism, between firmness and truculence, between a thoughtfully calculated goal and spasmodic reaction to the stimulus of emergencies."

....President Eisenhower's first inaugural address as quoted by Nichlas deB. Katzenbach in the epilogue to his memoirs...Some Of It Was Fun: Working With RFK and LBJ (W.W. Norton)
 

March 20:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life."

....Henry David Thoreau...
 

March 18:

"If one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like a revelation takes place."

....May Sarton...

March 16:

"Music and women I cannot, but give way to. whatever my business is."

....Samuel Pepys...
 

March 13:

"The less money you have, the less you worry."

....George Orwell...

March 11:

"We read to know we're not alone."

....C.S. Lewis...
 

March 9:

"You in the castle of your skin, I among the swineheart.

....Derek Walcott...
 

March 6:

"I've only met two real writers besides myself and that's you and Billy (Styron)."

....James Jones letter to Norman Mailer...
 

March 4:

"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."

....Oscar Wilde...The Picture Of Dorian Gray...

March 2:

"Why can't you harness Might so that it works for Right?...The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can't neglect it."

....T.H. White...The Once And Future King,,,
 

Feb. 27:

"My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background."

....Franz Kafka...
 

Feb. 25:

"The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things."

....Carl Jung...
 

Feb. 23:

"Man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep."

....W.H. Auden...
 

Feb. 20:

"Words do not live in dictionaries. They live in the mind."

...Virginia Woolf...

Feb. 18:

"I think of myself as a blues singer. What I'm trying to do is sing the blues in prose."

...James Baldwin...
 

Feb. 16:

"I no longer mind what people think of me."

...Somerset Maugham...

Feb. 13:

"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind."

...Fahrenheit 451...Ray Bradbury...
 

Feb. 11:

"Who Controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past."

...1984...George Orwell...
 

Feb. 9:

"There is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl the earth."

...The Iliad...Homer...

Feb. 6:

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incanardine, making the green one red."

...William Shakespeare's...Macbeth...

Feb. 4:

"I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there."

...John Knowles...A Separate Peace...
 

Feb. 2:

 "From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife."

...William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet...
 

Jan. 30:

"I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on."

...Mary Shelley's Frankenstein...
 

Jan. 28:

"Words are like chemicals...some combinations fizzle. Others explode."

...Louis Nizer...
 

Jan. 26:

"I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy."

...Truman Capote...

Jan. 16:

"You don't have to be nice to be talented."

...Kirk Douglas to Stanley Kubrick...

Jan. 14:

"I think a poet, like any other human being, should recognize that the world is mostly controlled by political forces and should become politically active too!"

...Adrian Mitchell...
 

Jan. 12:

"Sesquipedalian Spark of the Right."

...NYT's obit on Willaim F. Buckley 2/27/08...
 

Jan. 9:

"A Steinway is a Steinway."

...John Steinway...
 

Jan. 7:

"Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!"

...Albert Hoffman...
 

Jan. 5:

"All those altered scales and harmonic extensions people were calling modern in the 1940's, I knew all about years earlier."

...Lionel Hampton...