Curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest form.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. … Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. … Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905
As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.
—Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping, 1926
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
—Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, 2002
Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.
—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
I admire what he puts his nervous system through. I admire his passion for the front-row seat. Beautiful wives, beautiful mistresses, alimony the size of the national debt, polar expeditions, war-front reportage, famous friends, famous enemies, breakdowns, public lectures, five-hundred-page novels every third year, and still, as you said before, time and energy left over for all that self-absorption. … It’s no picnic up there in the egosphere.
—Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer, 1979
“Some critic called me the Nothingness Himself and that didn’t help my sense of existence any. Then I realized that existence itself is nothing and I felt better. But I’m still obsessed with the idea of looking into the mirror and seeing no one, nothing.”
—Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B & Back Again, 1975
Seed–summer–tomb–
Whose Doom to whom?
—Emily Dickinson, “A Pit–but Heaven over it–” (undated)
Basic rights are the morality of the depths. They specify the line beneath which no one is to be allowed to sink.
—Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1980
In America ‘the despicable, exquisite, confounding, ever-changing swamp’ is a cultural imaginary as well as an endangered habitat. … Peatlands are wetlands, the argument goes, and wetlands disturb us; they’re the abject backwaters of modernity—marginal and malarial, disavowed and despoiled. We’ve ruined them and now they’ll ruin us right back.
—Fraser MacDonald, “On Marshy Ground,” London Review of Books, June 2023
I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
… He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.
—Rita Dove, “Vacation,” On the Wing: American Poems of Air and Space Flight, 2005
To see [the Colosseum] crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to see its Pit of Fight filled up with earth … is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable.
—Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 1846
Today the queen ant and her lovers
took their nuptial flight, scattering
upwards …
My love, I can’t speak with authority
on commodity futures, the wonders of the east
and the behaviour of insects in Liverpool
and Tunbridge Wells or any city
outside my directly observable reality,
but it’s flying ant day in my heart
if nowhere else.
—Richard Osmond, “Love Song, 31st July,” Useful Verses, 2017
State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.
—Thomas Jefferson, to his nephew Peter Carr, August 1787
I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string. It was too early to eat, and too hot. I turned on the fan in my office. It didn’t make the air any cooler, just a little more lively. Outside on the boulevard the traffic brawled endlessly. Inside my head thoughts stuck together like flies on flypaper.
—Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 1953
“ ‘I know of a cure for everything: salt water.’
“ ‘Salt water?’ I asked him.
“ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.’ ”
—Isak Dinesen, “The Deluge at Norderney,” Seven Gothic Tales, 1934
“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”
—Flannery O’Connor, Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, Rosemary M. Magee, ed., 1987
Let me be Los Angeles.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939
