Quote collection
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed."
"but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric."
"The United States needed a civil war to unite properly."
"Simple mechanisms do not love."
"I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels."
"I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22."
"You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them."
"It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio."
"The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument."
"If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded."
"We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena."
"My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne."
"There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past."
"Terrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the "heroes" underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise."
"There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition."
"In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames."
"When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés moves us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime."
"Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after."
"This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain."
"Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know."