Quote collection
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it, and it works."
"Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks."
"Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride."
"She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling"
"True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth."
"The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business."
"You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it."
". . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization."
"I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books."
"The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on."
"People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon."
"It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family."
"I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave."
"The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times."
"We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license - until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall."
"It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it."
"...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life."
"I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period."
"I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."
"The reason I don't like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different."