Going Quotes (page 283)
Do you know what constitutes a great poet? He is a person without shame, incapable of blushing. Ordinary fools have moments when they go off by themselves and blush with shame; not so the great poet.... If you really have to quote someone, quote a geographer; that way you won't give yourself away. (p 44)
Knut Hamsun
The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say, 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean...
Russell Hoban
In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
I know what it's like when people go away. It's agony for a week, then painful for a week, then you begin to forget, and then it seems as it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo, it's life, that's the way the things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven't really lost something for ever.
John Fowles
So far nothing in your life has interfered with your reasoning
process. Those are twelve reasonable men in everyday life, Tom’s jury, but you saw something come between them and reason. You saw the same thing that night in front of the jail. When that crew went away, they didn’t go as reasonable men, they went because we were there. There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black...
Harper Lee
Under your shelter all things come and go. Children are violent and valiant, they run and they shout like the winners of impossible victories, but before long now, even like me, they will be brought into their sleep. Those who are grown great talk with confidence and are at all times skillful to serve and to protect, but before long now they too, before long, even like me, will be taken in and put to bed. Soon come those hours when no one wakes. Even the locusts, even the crickets, silent...
James Agee