“The architects that preceded us in ceaseless labor, life after life, built on the inherited acropolis of law a constitutional structure ever-changing, ever enduring, unfinished, in parts neglected and decaying, obdurate yet imagined. Their legacy resides in the methods by which, case by case, generation by generation, the barriers of law channel the tumults of politics and power toward justice and equality, and away from violence and cruel oppression. Their genius was to deliver to us a temple whose innermost chamber contains a question. They could not decide for us, but they could give us the ways our decisions are assessed and explained. Having mastered the ways of the law that they taught us, we must in the end find our own answers to the awesome questions that mastery poses but cannot resolve. Someday, if we’re lucky, our descendants will struggle as we do with such decisions. Will they make them according to law or will they sell, or barter, or give them away to those who are only too happy to decide without having to explain?” – Philip C. Bobbitt, “Impeachment: A Handbook”
Author: Tetman Callis
“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
“No two mornings are ever quite the same. Some are cold and dark and rainy, and some—a great many, in fact—are like the beginning of the world. First the idea of morning comes, and then, though it is still utterly dark and you can’t see your hand in front of your face, a rooster crows, and you’d swear it was a mistake, because it is another twenty minutes before the first light, when the rooster crows again and again, and soon after that the birds begin, praising the feathered god who made them. With their whole hearts, every single bird in creation. And then comes the grand climax. The sky turns red, and the great fiery ball comes up over the eastern horizon. After which there is a coda. The birds repeat their praise, one bird at a time, and the rooster gives one last, thoughtful crow, and the beginning of things comes to an end.” – William Maxwell, “The lamplighter”
“A woman who has no secrets from her husband is not a woman but a child.” – William Maxwell, “The pessimistic fortune-teller”
“Big Brother, it turns out, is a capitalist who wants to sell you blue jeans.” – “The everywhere stores,” The Economist, October 28th, 2017
“Characters in fiction are seldom made out of whole cloth. A little of this person and something of that one and whatever else the novelist’s imagination suggests is how they come into being. The novelist hopes that by avoiding actual appearances and actual names (which are so much more convincing than the names he invents for them), by making tall people short and red-headed people blond, that sort of thing, the sources of the composite character will not be apparent.” – William Maxwell, “The Front and the Back Parts of the House”
“The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.” – William Maxwell, “The Man in the Moon” (emphasis in original)
“There are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.” – Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions
“It is necessary to set myself out of motion, to disremember the automatic commands I have followed for so long, so many years of willfulness and waste. No more deconstruction or synopsis. Only pure unbroken signal. I open wide and it comes in so loud and clear that I twinge all up and down.” – Hob Broun, Inner Tube
“You could enter into people only so far and then had to come out the same way. There was never a way clear through. You were always back to where you started.” – Gary Lutz, “I Have to Feel Halved”
“It is said, isn’t it, that you ‘make’ love because it’s otherwise not really there?” – Gary Lutz, “I Have to Feel Halved”
“Their mother had taught them that you can ask anybody anything, but it can’t always be, ‘Do I know you?’ That you had arms to bar yourself from people. That you had to watch what you touched after you had already gone ahead and touched some other thing first. That the most pestering thing on a man was the thing that kept playing tricks with how long it actually was.” – Gary Lutz, “People Shouldn’t Have to Be the Ones to Tell You”
“It’s so silly, and really it’s my own stupid fault. Ed’ll kill me, not for the money but like they say for the principle. You know. He thinks I’m a terrible slob that way, he’s a great one for believing in foreseeable actions. I lost the Buick last year, and the year before that I lost the baby in the parking lot. God, how I hate people of principle. All the persecutors of the world have been people of principle.” – Cynthia Ozick, “The Suitcase” (emphasis in original)
“The public interest in preserving the sanctity of the family is a significant public interest.” — Judge Stephan C. Hansbury, Superior Court of New Jersey, in K.A. and K.I.A v. J.L.
“Memory can be the wind on someone’s back. It rides there for a moment before fleeing into a field of oblivion.” – Vi Khi Nao, “It’s a Fish Sitting on My Face”
“That baby should follow baby is God’s trick on us, but surely we too can have a trick on God? If we fabricate with our syllables an immortality passed from the spines of the old to the shoulders of the young, even God cannot spite it. If the prayer-load that spilled upward from the mass graves should somehow survive! If not the thicket of lamentation itself, then the language on which it rode.” – Cynthia Ozick, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America”
“A house is not a home. It’s just an unflattering brick-and-shingle apparatus for seeing to it that people get bulked into belittling intimacy on the unlofty proppage of furniture.” – Gary Lutz, “A Woman with No Middle Name”
“I spent a great deal of time on my knees. If you didn’t go along, there were 25 girls who would.” – Marilyn Monroe (quoted in “An Open Secret,” The Economist, October 21st, 2017)
“I had no idea that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life characters—affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black—that I was presented with when I came into the world. The look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered. The Natural History of home: the suede glove on the front-hall table, the unfinished game of solitaire, the oriole’s nest suspended from the tip of the outermost branch of the elm tree, dandelions in the grass. All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognize instinctively what would make a story or sustain the complicated cross-weaving of longer fiction.” – William Maxwell, “Preface,” All the Days and Nights
“America’s good at plumbing.” – Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy
“If I avoid metaphor, and if I have to think of a reason why, it may be that I don’t want to distract from the one thing that I’m concentrating on, and a metaphor immediately does that. It introduces some completely, even incongruous, other image and world. And it can work very beautifully, but maybe I don’t want to leave the scene of what I’m describing.” – Lydia Davis, (interviewed by Andrea Aguilar and Johanne Fronth-Nygren in Paris Review)
“We judge a myth by its practical influences, and are obliged to ask it practical questions: What do you intend? Who should respect you? What will you cause? What do you disclose about envy, cruelty, lust, hope, growth, power, choice, faith, pity? Whose mouth should receive you?” – Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy
“After the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up, it reassembled in Cleveland.” – Edward McClelland, How to Speak Midwestern
“Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.” – Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (trans. Ted Humphrey)
“The Chicago accent was most widespread during the city’s industrial heyday. Blue-collar work and strong regional speech are closely connected: if you graduated from high school in the 1960s, you didn’t need to go to college, or even leave your neighborhood, to get a good job, and once you got that job, you didn’t have to talk to anyone outside your house, your factory, your tavern, or your parish. A regular Joe accent was a sign of masculinity and local cred, bonding forces important for the teamwork of industrial labor. A 1970s study of steelworker families on Chicago’s East Side by linguist Robin Herndobler found that women were less likely than their husbands to say ‘dese, dem, and dose,’ because they dealt with doctors, teachers, and other professionals. After the mills closed, kids went to college, where they learned not to say ’dat,’ and took office jobs requiring interaction with people outside the neighborhood.” – Edward McClelland, How to Speak Midwestern
“Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them, and each has a natural respect for the other.” – D. H. Lawrence, “À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover”
“Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“Nobody knows what should be done, in spite of all the talk. The young ones get mad because they’ve no money to spend. Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilisation and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half-conscious, and half alive. We’ve got to come alive and aware.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. . . . It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover