Doing Quotes (page 616)
While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
[Marianne Moore] once remarked, after a visit to her brother and his family, that the state of being married and having children had one enormous advantage: "One never has to worry about whether one is doing the right thing or not. There isn't time. One is always having to go to the market or drive the children somewhere. There isn't time to wonder 'Is this right or isn't it?
Elizabeth Bishop
In a pocket of his knapsack he'd found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy and then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim.
You promised not to do that, the boy said.
What?
You know what, Papa.
He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy's cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back.
I have to watch you all the time, the boy said.
Cormac McCarthy
Let me twine. Mine arms about that body, where against. My grained ash an hundred times hath broke And scarr'd the moon with splinters: here I clip. The anvil of my sword, and do contest. As hotly and as nobly with thy love. As ever in ambitious strength I did. Contend against thy valour. Know thou first, I loved the maid I married; never man. Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here, Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart. Than when I first my wedded mistress saw. Bestride my...
William Shakespeare
How could you be so naive as to tell a human being the truth? Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing. If you wish to gain the favor of the two-legged ilk, you must learn to fabricate as wholeheartedly as they do.
Tom Robbins