quotage
from the MLK center, a few quotes:
"Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody."
"In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality."
(this was the one that slew me):
"Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's Theory of Relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace; a soul generated by love."
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the only thing I like in The Great Gatsby
"And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately--and the decision must be made by some force--of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality--that was close at hand."
----------------------------------------------------
and quite a few from The Age of Innocence, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite books.
"'You like so much to be alone?' 'Yes, as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.'"
"'Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that? Why not make one's own fashions? But I suppose I've lived too independently; at any rate, I want to do what you all do--I want to feel cared for and safe.'"
"'...They like and admire you--they want to help you.' She shook her head and sighed. 'Oh, I know--I know! But on condition that they don't hear anything unpleasant. Aunt Welland put it in those very words when I tried...Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!' She lifted her hands to her face, and he saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob. 'Madame Olenska!--Oh, don't, Ellen,' he cried, starting up and bending over her. He drew down one of her hands, clasping and chafing it like a child's while he murmured reassuring words; but in a moment she freed herself, and looked up at him with wet lashes. 'Does no one cry here, either? I suppose there's no need to, in heaven,' she said, straightening her loosened braids with a laugh..."
"Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and 'people who wrote.' These scattered fragments of humanity had never shown any desire to be amalgamated with the social structure. In spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves."
"'Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody else here.' Archer reddened. 'You'll never be like everybody else,' he said. She raised her straight eyebrows a little. 'Ah, don't say that. If you knew how I hate to be different!' Her face had grown as somber as a tragic mask. She leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into remote dark distances. 'I want to get away from it all,' she insisted."
"'The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest...'"
"...[he] plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate."
"...she had asked him to 'be kind to Ellen' in their absence. 'She likes you and admires you so much--and you know, though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and unhappy. I don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott either; they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she is.'"
"He had declined three dinner invitations in favor of this feast; but though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him: The House of Life. He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions."
"'No, no; not one of them wants to be different; they're as scared of it as the small-pox.'"
"He muttered something about leaving unexpectedly, in a great hurry, and having intended to write to her from St. Augustine. 'And of course once you were there you never thought of me again!' She continued to beam on him with a gaiety that might have been a studied assumption of indifference."
"'Ah, but she won't abandon you. Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.'"
"The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple."
"'But from the very beginning,' she continued, 'I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary. The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before--and it's better than anything I've known."
"'You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant à soi. And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the same self-abdication.'"
"'I'll say anything you like; or nothing. I won't open my mouth unless you tell me to. What harm can it do anybody? All I want is to listen to you,' he stammered.'"
"'You needn't be afraid--if I don't come.' 'Nor you either--if you do. I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've beendoing. It's a hundred years since we've met--it may be another hundred before we meet again.'"
"Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation."
"There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder."
"By being so quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other..."
"'But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody else's tradition--that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.'"
"'At least,' she continued, 'it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself'--she drew together her troubled brows--'but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.'"
"... and he went on: 'What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all.' 'Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!' she burst out, her eyes filling."
"Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquilized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity."
"Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the winds. 'I think you're the most honest woman I ever met!' he exclaimed. 'Oh, no--but probably one of the least fussy,' she answered, a smile in her voice. 'Call it what you like: you look at things as they are.' 'Ah--I've had to. I've had to look at the Gorgon.' 'Well--it hasn't blinded you! You've seen that she's just an old bogey like all the others.' 'She doesn't blind one; but she dries up one's tears.'"
"...'I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burned up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true.'"
"His mind, as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other. Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects--hardly recognizable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles--made of glass, of clay, of discolored bronze and other time-blurred substances. 'It seems cruel,' she said, 'that after a while nothing matters...any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: "Use unknown."' 'Yes; but meanwhile--' 'Ah, meanwhile--' As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and color should ever suffer the stupid law of change. 'Meanwhile everything matters--that concerns you,' he said."
"Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody."
"In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality."
(this was the one that slew me):
"Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's Theory of Relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace; a soul generated by love."
-----------------------------------------------------
the only thing I like in The Great Gatsby
"And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately--and the decision must be made by some force--of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality--that was close at hand."
----------------------------------------------------
and quite a few from The Age of Innocence, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite books.
"'You like so much to be alone?' 'Yes, as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.'"
"'Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that? Why not make one's own fashions? But I suppose I've lived too independently; at any rate, I want to do what you all do--I want to feel cared for and safe.'"
"'...They like and admire you--they want to help you.' She shook her head and sighed. 'Oh, I know--I know! But on condition that they don't hear anything unpleasant. Aunt Welland put it in those very words when I tried...Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!' She lifted her hands to her face, and he saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob. 'Madame Olenska!--Oh, don't, Ellen,' he cried, starting up and bending over her. He drew down one of her hands, clasping and chafing it like a child's while he murmured reassuring words; but in a moment she freed herself, and looked up at him with wet lashes. 'Does no one cry here, either? I suppose there's no need to, in heaven,' she said, straightening her loosened braids with a laugh..."
"Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and 'people who wrote.' These scattered fragments of humanity had never shown any desire to be amalgamated with the social structure. In spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves."
"'Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody else here.' Archer reddened. 'You'll never be like everybody else,' he said. She raised her straight eyebrows a little. 'Ah, don't say that. If you knew how I hate to be different!' Her face had grown as somber as a tragic mask. She leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into remote dark distances. 'I want to get away from it all,' she insisted."
"'The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest...'"
"...[he] plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate."
"...she had asked him to 'be kind to Ellen' in their absence. 'She likes you and admires you so much--and you know, though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and unhappy. I don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott either; they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she is.'"
"He had declined three dinner invitations in favor of this feast; but though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him: The House of Life. He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions."
"'No, no; not one of them wants to be different; they're as scared of it as the small-pox.'"
"He muttered something about leaving unexpectedly, in a great hurry, and having intended to write to her from St. Augustine. 'And of course once you were there you never thought of me again!' She continued to beam on him with a gaiety that might have been a studied assumption of indifference."
"'Ah, but she won't abandon you. Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.'"
"The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple."
"'But from the very beginning,' she continued, 'I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary. The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before--and it's better than anything I've known."
"'You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant à soi. And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the same self-abdication.'"
"'I'll say anything you like; or nothing. I won't open my mouth unless you tell me to. What harm can it do anybody? All I want is to listen to you,' he stammered.'"
"'You needn't be afraid--if I don't come.' 'Nor you either--if you do. I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've beendoing. It's a hundred years since we've met--it may be another hundred before we meet again.'"
"Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation."
"There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder."
"By being so quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other..."
"'But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody else's tradition--that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.'"
"'At least,' she continued, 'it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself'--she drew together her troubled brows--'but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.'"
"... and he went on: 'What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all.' 'Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!' she burst out, her eyes filling."
"Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquilized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity."
"Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the winds. 'I think you're the most honest woman I ever met!' he exclaimed. 'Oh, no--but probably one of the least fussy,' she answered, a smile in her voice. 'Call it what you like: you look at things as they are.' 'Ah--I've had to. I've had to look at the Gorgon.' 'Well--it hasn't blinded you! You've seen that she's just an old bogey like all the others.' 'She doesn't blind one; but she dries up one's tears.'"
"...'I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burned up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true.'"
"His mind, as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other. Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects--hardly recognizable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles--made of glass, of clay, of discolored bronze and other time-blurred substances. 'It seems cruel,' she said, 'that after a while nothing matters...any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: "Use unknown."' 'Yes; but meanwhile--' 'Ah, meanwhile--' As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and color should ever suffer the stupid law of change. 'Meanwhile everything matters--that concerns you,' he said."