Posts tagged quotes
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fat is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect friends to follow this or that logical convention pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has ever seen.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
But what happens when our views shift in the other direction? What happens when those we cherish in our memory become prickly and two-dimensional, when simple memories of warmth and happiness dissolve into the acid of time and reveal themselves as visions only, mere verisimilitude of life as we have experienced it? What then do we do with those memories, all the questions of what happened in that space of time between our last meeting?
Can you ever make whole what time has rent?
Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
John Adams
…once wrote in his journal, three days in a row, only this: “At home, thinking.”
Rabindranath Tagore
Quotes that make me shudder:
“It is very difficult here to keep one’s strength of mind. There is no one to really help you. You cannot find anybody with whom one can exchange a few words and feel alive within ten or twenty miles—nobody thinks, nobody feels, nobody works; nobody has any experience of a great work or a life worth living … They eat, go to [the] office, sleep, smoke, and chatter and chatter like complete idiots.”
“Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in: that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something where we see nothing are unceasing.”
