“The measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” – Jim Vance (as quoted by J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy)
Category: Lit & Crit
“There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.” – Bonnie Blanton (as quoted by J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy)
“One of the many unhappy oddities of the contemporary United States is that so many of us are Bible-obsessed yet have never read the Bible.” – Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium
“It is only when all sides of an issue are forcefully presented and the various solutions thereof closely scrutinized that the final plan has any validity.” – Maj. Gen. Orlando Ward, U.S.A., The War Department: Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-1942, United States Army in World War Two
“The common ground of shamanistic dreams and voyages is the ultimate human desire: survival in the confrontation with death. Theologians work at doubtless higher levels, but the Jesus of the people, almost everywhere, is the universal shaman. This may not be against the genius of Christianity, but it certainly is against the teaching of Catholicism and the mainline Protestant churches. Resurrection for these does not follow the pattern of Jesus, whose ascension in those traditions was viewed as a kind of promissory note for the vast resurrection someday to come, or perhaps more as a first installment.” – Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium (emphasis in original)
“Psychoanalysis was and is a shamanism; its affiliations with occultism or parapsychology are far more authentic than its supposed links to biology, as a discipline. Freud kept hoping that psychoanalysis would make a contribution to biology, but this was an absurd wish. Though it is an ideology that exalts fact, Freud’s creation is a mythology, reared upon the central myths of the drives of love and death. In the longest perspective its deepest affinities are with the pre-Socratic shaman Empedocles, whose vision of incessant strife emerges again in the Freudian tragic view of a civil war in the individual psyche.” – Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium
“Telling a story is an act freighted with far more implications than good storytellers are likely to know. (If they knew, they’d probably not be good storytellers.) It is an act premised on the accessibility and, still more, the transparency of meaning.” – Irving Howe, “Ragged Individualist”
“If a man sits long enough, sorrowful and anxious, bereft of joy, his mind constantly darkening, soon it seems to him that his troubles are limitless.” – “Deor’s Lament” (trans. Michael R. Burch)
“A brigadier general then in OPD [Operations Division of the General Staff, United States Army] told the author that, after some extracurricular scientific reflection in the early spring of 1945, he conceived the idea that the release of atomic energy for military purposes might be practical. He said he innocently aired the suggestion in the War Department that the Japanese might be working on such a weapon and wondered if the United States should not be doing something about it. He was considerably surprised at the intensive security check to which he was suddenly subjected. The fact that OPD officers in general had no idea of what was in the immediate future is indicated by their consternation when a project for construction of an artificial harbor for use in the March 1946 attack on Japan was approved with ‘priority above all military and naval programs except MANHATTAN project.’ OPD officers told the author that they could not guess nor discover what the mysterious MANHATTAN was and doubted that it could be more important than the harbor for 1946. One S&P [Strategy & Policy Group] officer said he received oral orders from General Hull [Director of Operations Division] to quit trying to find out anything about MANHATTAN.” – Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, United States Army in World War Two (internal citations omitted)
“You know the self primarily by knowing yourself; knowing another human being is immensely difficult, perhaps impossible, though in our youth or even in our middle years we deceive ourselves about this.” – Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium
“Christianity in the early barbarian West may have thought it was being assimilated by a warrior aristocracy, but it ended up—even before the Crusades—accommodating itself to the heroic values of the nobility. The blending of the two cultures would have begun at the time of conversion, but it was an extended process.” – Roberta Frank, “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History”
“Security consciousness in OPD [Operations Division of the General Staff, United States Army] was so well established by the end of the war that the author and associate historians, though explicitly authorized by the Chief of Staff and the OPD chief to see all War Department files, had many administrative battles with the executive office and the record room before officers in charge became convinced that the chief of OPD had really meant that anyone, particularly a civilian, should see everything in Division files. While the historians found most of the staff members extremely co-operative, the policy of tight security was very strong.” – Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, United States Army in World War Two
“The War Department, like every other installation in the zone of interior, found it harder and harder to maintain high standards for its enlisted detachment. Toward the close of 1943 OPD [Operations Division of the General Staff, United States Army] was authorized to overcome its difficulties in staffing its secretariat by using enlisted women (Wacs [Women’s Army Corps]) as well as enlisted men and civilians. By recruiting increasing numbers of enlisted women, the Division added to the strength of its clerical staff and in general maintained its exacting standards of competence. By V-J Day enlisted women made up nearly one-third of the strength of the total Division secretariat, nearly equaling each of the other two components.” – Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, United States Army in World War Two
“The wages of heroism is death.” – J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”
“Myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.” – J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”
“What I appreciated about New York was that it didn’t pretend to safety. On the best of days it was like living in a glorious brawl. Surviving this year by year was an honor mark that people wore proudly. After five years you earned bragging rights. At seven you began to fit in.” – Alice Sebold, Lucky
“To be named is to proceed from nonexistence to existence.” – John Bussanich, “A Theoretical Interpretation of Hesiod’s Chaos”
“Red-haired men in Ireland and elsewhere are always rogues.” – Joseph Jacobs (ed.), Celtic Fairy Tales
“The MacDonald of Saddell Castle was a very great man indeed. Once, when dining with the Lord-Lieutenant, an apology was made to him for placing him so far away from the head of the table. ‘Where the MacDonald sits,’ was the proud response, ‘there is the head of the table.’ ” – Joseph Jacobs (ed.),Celtic Fairy Tales
“I say nothing beats the art o’ man, barring the bees.” – Joseph Jacobs (ed.), “King O’Toole and His Goose,” Celtic Fairy Tales
“I am grateful for the knowledge that people who love us do so because it is they who are good, not us.” – Mikhail Iossel, author of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire
“God gave you a penis and a brain, and only enough blood to run one at a time.” – Robin Williams, 2002
“Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.” – Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” – Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
“More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been found, among them Shagspeare, Shakspere, and even Shakestaffe. Shakespeare himself did not spell the name the same way twice in any of his six known signatures and even spelled it two ways on one document, his will, which he signed Shakspere in one place and Shakspeare in another. Curiously, the one spelling he never seemed to use himself was Shakespeare.” – Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
“We speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx—or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it—and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongues around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, and sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a string of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.” – Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
“Remember that the city is a funny place, something like a circus or a sewer. And different people, they’ve got peculiar tastes. And the glory of love just might see you through.” – Lou Reed, “Coney Island Baby”
“A vagrant is anybody a cop don’t like.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“Beside an irrigation ditch a preacher labored and the people cried. And the preacher paced like a tiger, whipping the people with his voice, and they groveled and whined on the ground. He calculated them, gauged them, played on them, and when they were all squirming on the ground he stooped down and of his great strength he picked each one up in his arms and shouted, Take ‘em, Christ! and threw each one in the water. And when they were all in, waist deep in the water, and looking with frightened eyes at the master, he knelt down on the bank and he prayed for them; and he prayed that all men and women might grovel and whine on the ground. Men and women, dripping, clothes sticking tight, watched; then gurgling and sloshing in their shoes they walked back to the camp, to the tents, and they talked softly in wonder: We been saved, they said. We’re washed white as snow. We won’t never sin again. And the children, frightened and wet, whispered together: We been saved. We won’t sin no more.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“It’s all downhill after the first kiss.” – Lou Reed, “Modern Dance”