In order of métier: Poets,
Playwrights,
Novelists,
Others
“Look at them through the indifference of smoke / and of sunglasses.”
-“The Ethics of Surrender” in “The Ethics of Surrender”
“They’ve taken the river and by they I mean time, so that to look at it
is to drown in it and not in the undertow but in the music of it.”
-“The Dream of the River” in “The Ethics of Surrender”
“Episcopalians from the Golden Age”
-“Our Gods” in “These Days”
“There is another accent, that goes to Harvard / That anyone who does can have.”
-“On Wings of Song” in “These Days”
“They are as young as Homer whom they loved.”
-“To Robert Lowell and Osip Mandelstam” in “Men and Women”
“She recited verses from the Koran/ Over champagne in the salon/ And was only eighteen/ And was too good to be true.”
-“Racine” in “Going Fast”
“WASPs can’t get lung cancer smoking Camels,/ Chisholm said…”
-“Hugh Jeremy Chisholm” in “Area Code 212”
“Mothers call their prophet children home,
but prophets hear a different call to truth,
and women don’t come first; they fear the tomb.”
-“Pietà” in “The Invisible”
“Weeping spreads like wine’s hot blush.”
-“After the Wedding Feast” in “The Invisible”
“The things that we build or grow or do are so little when compared to the things that we suggest or believe or desire.”
“You left just as the stars were beginning to go
the colors came back without you
you left us the colors
sand and rocks and the shades of late summer.”
-“A Death in the Desert” in “The Pupil”
“For my part, I feel no disposition to pass all my own life in the wilderness of pedantry, in order that a posterity which I shall never see may one day enter an orthographical Canaan.”
-On Translating Homer, note to Hawtrey’s hexameters
“Spring rushes to trample the meadows of Hellas.”
-“Tortoise” from Tristia
“She reads Faust in the carriage,
Understanding not a word,
And regrets that Louis
No longer holds the throne.”
-“An American Girl of Twenty” from Tristia
“La tristesse majesteueuse qui fait tout le plaisir de la tragédie.”
-Préface de Bérénice
“Alles bestehende is ein Gleichnis.”
-Source unknown to me
“Cusins: Let me advise you to study Greek, Mr Undershaft. Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek; and none of them know anything else; but their position is unchallengeable. Other languages are the qualifications of waiters and commercial travelers: Greek is to a man of position what the hallmark is to silver.”
-Major Barbara, Act I
“Undershaft: My dear Barbara: alcohol is a very necessary article…[i]t makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.”
-Ibidem, Act II
.
“Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love; it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story would we know by their actions alone whether it was the treacherous Judas or the cowardly Peter who had better loved Christ?” - The End of the Affair
“‘There are only three things that can be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’”
-Justine
“Poets are not really serious about ideas or people. They regard them much as a Pasha regards the members of an extensive harem. They are pretty, yes. They are for use. But there is no question of them being true or false, or having souls. In this way the poet preserves his freshness of vision, and finds everything miraculous.”
-Balthazar
“Dear Mr. Ash,
…If all persons to whom I refused mere vegetable ailment were so to regale me with intellectual nourishment I should remain obdurate in the matter of sandwiches till all eternity.”
-Possession
“J' avais commencé un coeur simple à son intention exclusive, uniquement pour lui plaire. Elle est morte, comme j' étais au milieu de mon oeuvre. Il en est ainsi de tous nos rêves.”
-Letters
“’French people spend a remarkably high proportion of their income on food,’ said Willy seriously.”
-Human Voices
“Over the years with my consumption of French wine, language, and letters, I’m at least half French.”
-The Thought Gang
“For who among us knows the future or what any of our friends is fated to suffer? Quickly then take two mushrooms gathered from the ilex and cook them.”
-Ibidem, ascribed to Antiphanes
“She was of a generation that had had to direct its animosity to people a hundred kilometers down the road, before they had imported enough foreigners to fill that function.”
-Ibidem
“How do you manage to live with such fog? By the time a gentleman has recognized a lady as she comes at him out of the fog, it is already to late to raise his hat. I’m surprised the race doesn’t die out when such conditions make difficult the natural courtesies.”
-From a fictive letter of Flaubert in Flaubert’s Parrot
“All marks will be awarded for the correctness of the answers; none for presentation or handwriting. Marks will be deducted for facetious or conceitedly brief answers.”
-From a fictive exam in Flaubert’s Parrot
“…dieses Nebeneinander von Wohltun und Sichwohltun.”
-Diary, on Frau Doktor Eugenie Schwarzwald
“Silk brocades and watered tabinet, satins and satinettes, cambletts and cheveretts, prunelles, callimancoes, and Florentines, diamantines and grenadines, blondines, bombazines, belle-isles and martiniques.”
-The Rings of Saturn
“I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.” – Decline and Fall
"I can't think why fancy religions should have such a
ghastly effect on one's grammar."
"One first of April, the question had arrived from
Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly. 'Num...?'--a particle which notoriously 'expects
the answer No.' Jarriet, rummaging the
Grammar book for 'polite negatives,' replied, still more briefly,
'Benigne.'"
"Calling people names that poor Miss Lydgate didn't
know existed--the worst she knows being Restoration Drama..."
Yes; the Dean was right; here was the great Anglican
compromise at its most soothing and ceremonial. The solemn procession of doctors in hoods and habit; the
Vice-Chancellor bowing to the preacher, and the bedels tripping before them;
the throng of black gowns and the decorous gaiety of the summer-frocked wives
of dons; the hymn and the bidding-prayer; the gowned and hooded preacher austere
in cassock and bands; the quiet discourse delivered in a thin, clear, scholarly
voice, and dealing with the relations of the Christian philosophy to atomic
physics. Here was the University and the
Church of England kissing one
another in righteousness and peace, like the angels in a Botticelli Nativity: very exquisitely robed, very cheerful in a serious kind of way, a little mannered, a little conscious of their fine mutual courtesy."
--Gaudy Night (Omnes)
“I find you refreshing, Wimsey,” said Fentiman, languidly. “You’re not in the least witty, but you have a kind of obvious facetiousness which reminds me of the less exacting class of music-hall.”
--The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
“[My mother] always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away. She is a very courageous woman, my lord.”
--Clouds of Witness
(of Oxford) “And to have a whole city which, by custom, the young could treat as their own, to be able to walk down its High Street as confidently as though it were your garden path, to be free to be arrogant and absurd—to annoy other people by making loud, precious talk in restaurants, or to carry a grass snake with you when you went to parties—that was the kind of thing that you would never be able to do unselfconsciously elsewhere, and which you needed to do.”
-Instead of a Letter
“ ‘The trouble is, I’m beginning to think that it is possible to be in love with two people at once.’ … Yes indeed, that was the trouble. How could it not be when the people one was meeting were all different, all real, none of them yet visibly crippled by the patterns their life would impose on them into distrust, or masochism, or boredom, or whatever deformity might overtake them later.”
-Ibidem
“Once during my twenties it occurred to me that a time would come when not only would I no longer dance, but I would not mind not dancing, and I wept.”
-Ibidem
(In a 1970 London obscenity trial for the novel The Mouth) “the presiding judge asked why we needed oral sex ‘when we’ve gone without it for a thousand years.’ This line of inquiry was picked up by the counsel for the defense in his speech to the jury: ‘Poor his lordship! Poor, poor his lordship! Gone without oral sex for a thousand years!”
-Quoted in the NYT magazine’s 12/29/02 obituary for Linda Lovelace
Boullée – Architect
“Cet auteur (Francois
Blondel) nous rapporte que Dieu pour punir ses peuples les menaça de leur ôter
leurs architectes.”
-Architecture,
Essai sur l’Art
Jean-Luc Godard
“Personne n’a besoin d’une
bombe atomique/ Ni d’un goblet en plastique.”
-Prénom: Camille
From Cleveland Amory’s The Proper
Bostonians
“I could not sleep if one of those Harvard professors were in
the house.”
James Truslow Adams, on
the Manichean views of early Adamses
“To identify oneself with God is to greatly complicate one’s
social relations.”
Richard Tawney – Economist
“Mr Charles, when I was
your age I too thought that the role of the Church of England was to see to it
that at least one gentleman was placed in every village.”
Frank D. Ashburn – Biographer
“It is eminently a church
of nice people.”
In re: the Episcopal Church in Peabody of
Groton
“Once when a sixth-former
conducting a mission service at Forge Village began to read a lesson with the
interesting statement ‘Here beginneth the first chapter according to St.
Genesis,’ the Rector’s comment was that the harvest was likely to be more
plenteous if the labourers were a little more intelligent than the flowers of
the field.”
From Peabody of Groton
Alan Flusser – Fashion historian
In pre-World War I days, a
hip flask and cigarette case were considered essential accessories for a
generation that regarded a drink before and a cigarette after as two of the
three best things in life. The demise
of tobacco has stigmatized even the most stylish of smoking implements, while
the flask has gone the way of the swizzle stick. For the moment, sex is still in fashion.
From Dressing the Man
Spelling modernised
General Sir Charles Napier – Statesman
“Peccavi.”
On having taken Sind
hhutto0@lycos.com
Heath Hutto