“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre.”
—G. K. Chesterton, “The Head of Caesar,” 1914
I’m alive in this moment when the sun is dying, or when climate change is destroying the planet, so many years from the big bang. So also with the body. I have a tendency to fat. Okay, that’s my situation.
—Fredric Jameson, The Years of Theory, 2024
I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech,” in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.
—Ernest Shackleton, South, 1919
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
—Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 1841
I have never seen him [Baryshnikov] so happy onstage, or so wild. … He rose like a piston; he landed like a lark. He took off like Jerry Lee Lewis; he finished like Jane Austen. From ledge to ledge of the dance he leapt, sure footed, unmindful, a man in love.
—Joan Acocella, “The Soloist,” The New Yorker, January 19, 1998
Then many things appear which he has never seen before—black hashes, jellies, the color of gold, ragouts in which mushrooms float like nenuphars upon ponds, dishes of whipt cream light as clouds.
—Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874
I was so struck with distribution of Galapagos organisms &c &c & with the character of the American fossil mammifers, &c &c that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact. … At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.
—Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker, January 11, 1844
Somewhere in the background of all this, my marriage crashed and my daughter grew up and left home. Next time I looked around I was living in Sydney with a severe modernist to whom the presence of a ukulele in the house would have been an outrage.
—Helen Garner, “Whisper and Hum,” Everywhere I Look, 2016
Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.
We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s
berserk. …
I set the controls, I pioneer
the seeding of the ionosphere.
I translate the Bible into velociraptor.
—Michael Robbins, “Alien Vs. Predator,” The New Yorker, January 12, 2009
Our Ed, who suffered from curvature of the spine, would not carry a stick, much less wear a built-up shoe. He behaved with sporting nonchalance and defied the orthopedists when they warned that his spinal column would collapse like a stack of dominoes. His style was to be free and limber. You had to take him as he came, no concessions offered. I admired him for that.
—Saul Bellow, “Him With His Foot in His Mouth,” 1984
[The ruler, in The Duchess of Malfi] is also the violent—not so much animalistic as specifically wolfish, untamable, degenerate, possibly cannibal—heart of the civil system. Ferdinand’s lycanthropic frenzy is specifically a mania generated by the court, and overtly an index of its moral crisis. … Inside each narrative there is a werewolf, secretly incorporated, just waiting to get out.
—Susan Wiseman, “Hairy on the Inside: Metamorphosis and Civility in English Werewolf Texts,” At the Borders of the Human, 1999
“I was lying full length, face down, on a narrow window ledge of the Hotel Biltmore in New York. My fingers clutched the cold stone. I peered, terrified, at the street twenty-six stories below. I was fascinated. I wanted to hurl myself over the edge.” Phil has to drag him back into the hotel room by his legs. “What a hell of an aviator I’ll make!” Winslow thinks. “If I’m frightened with a solid window ledge beneath me … what will happen when I’m actually up in the air?”
—Samuel Hynes, The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War, 2014
If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
—Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California, 1927
I read Gone With the Wind. My reaction was enthusiastic and immediate. “What a part for Ronald Colman,” I said. … The tremendous popularity of the book inspired many myths. One of these, frequently repeated, contends that Miss Mitchell had me in mind to play Rhett on the screen when she wrote her book. This is not true. She got her idea for the book and was writing it while I was a four-dollar-a-day laborer in the Oklahoma oil fields. I could have been an inspiration to no one, except possibly a soap salesman.
—Clark Gable, “I Was Afraid of Rhett Butler,” Liberty, February 1940
We are always thinking the days of Galileo are over. But they are not … the human race instinctively and always has it in for Galileo.
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould, “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling,” The Atlantic, January 1919
The prospect of revolutionary change—the much anticipated “posthuman future”—is at once exciting and terrifying. And yet I retain considerable faith in the staying power of our pre-posthuman selves. Enhancement arrives with the audacity of Napoleon; the body responds with the inertial resistance of those two great Russian generals, January and February.
—Cullen Murphy, “The Olden Mean,” The Atlantic, May 2003
Behind the color lies the cataclysm.
—Mark Rothko, Mark Rothko in Cornwall, 1959
