“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”
-Jorge Luis Borges
“…Then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
-James Joyce, ULYSSES
“But he did not sigh for what is not. The clue to all his utterance lies in the sheer appreciation of the instant moment, life surging itself into utterance at its very well-head. Eternity is only an abstraction from the actual present.”
-D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
“God bless…God damn.”
-James Thurber
Flannery O'Connor
“Well, I hadn’t thought of my work in terms of Social Problems…I always think more about it in terms of Human Beings.”
-Carson McCullers
"People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice."
-Charles Bukowski
"The effort to educate the uneducable is hopeless. Schools for adults soon become kindergartens for adults. The pupils are quite unable to take in the education proper to their years. The gogues thus have to provide them with amusement in kindergartens. The hope is that they will somehow learn to think as an accidental by-product of playing, but that hope is vain."
-H.L. Mencken
“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Hunter S. Thompson, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (A SAVAGE JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF THE AMERICAN DREAM)
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
-William Faulkner
“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning —
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE GREAT GATSBY
"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
-Mark Twain
