Category: Lit & Crit
“At that time [1849] so demoralizing was the effect of the gold-mines that everybody not in the military service justified desertion, because a soldier, if free, could earn more money in a day than he received per month. Not only did soldiers and sailors desert, but captains and masters of ships actually abandoned their vessels and cargoes to try their luck at the mines. Preachers and professors forgot their creeds and took to trade, and even to keeping gambling-houses.” — William Tecumseh Sherman, “Early Recollections of California,” from Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman
“Most of the time, we try to tell ourselves ‘I’m confident’ or ‘I’m doing well.’ But then, in a moment alone at home, you feel how close you are to some kind of abyss.” – Christian Tetzlaff (quoted by Jeremy Eichler in “String Theorist”)
“The relationship between war and literature is an old one, maybe even constitutive for literature. The re-creation of a traumatic past through fiction – though this does not represent reality as it was – can have a powerful impact on people and their memory, often a much stronger impact than historiography.” — Igor Stiks (quoted by Spela Mocnik in Asymptote)
“The past has many uses, and one of them is to inspire the present. People in any profession like to create an imaginary past, populated by the Ones Who Came Before. Sometimes, we figure these people to be narrow-minded fools and feel motivated to demonstrate our own superior tolerance and sophistication. More honorably, if not necessarily more accurately, we imagine our predecessors as nobler or braver than our small and anxious selves—as men and women who stuck up for principle and, by their righteousness, moved the world.” – Louis Menand, “Seeing It Now”
“The writing impulse seeks its own level and isn’t always given a chance to find it. You can’t make up your mind in a Comp Lit class that you’re going to be a Russian novelist. Or even an American novelist. Or a poet. Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place. It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre. You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.” — John McPhee, “Editors & Publisher”
“An artist is a monster that thinks it is human.” – Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood”
“A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.” – Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood”
“Look at the history of innovation! If people don’t call you nuts, then you are doing something wrong.” – Peter Eisenberger (quoted by Michael Specter in “The Climate Fixers”)
“There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” – Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
“Until we have created a romance of peace that would equal that of war, violence will not disappear from people’s lives.” – Count Harry Kessler (quoted by Alex Ross in “Diary of an Aesthete”)
“Junkies and alcoholics are interesting to watch for about five minutes, and then the tedium of their bottomless need, their self-aggrandizing defensiveness, sinks in, and you want to tun screaming for your life—because they’ll suck it out of you, given the chance.” – Hilton Als, “Down but Not Defeated”
“The big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight?” — Adam Gopnik, “Facing History”
“They who tell the people revolutionary legends, they who amuse themselves with sensational stories, are as criminal as the geographer who would draw up false charts for navigators.” – Sean Bonney, Happiness (Poems after Rimbaud)
“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila’s horses’ hooves have ever scoured.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.” – Gertrude Stein (quoted by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast)
“I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“If you ever fight, then you must win it. That’s all that counts. All the rest is cabbage.” — Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees
“All a man need ever do is obey.” — Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees
“No horse named Morbid ever won a race.” — Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees
The three were at the table now and the others sat close by except Pablo, who sat by himself in front of a bowl of the wine. It was the same stew as the night before and Robert Jordan ate it hungrily.
“In your country there are mountains? With that name [Montana] surely there are mountains,” Primitivo asked politely to make conversation. He was embarrassed at the drunkenness of Pablo.
“Many mountains and very high.”
“And are there good pastures?”
“Excellent; high pasture in the summer in forests controlled by the government. Then in the fall the cattle are brought down to the lower ranges.”
“Is the land there owned by the peasants?”
“Most land is owned by those who farm it. Originally the land was owned by the state and by living on it and declaring the intention of improving it, a man could obtain title to a hundred and fifty hectares.”
“Tell me how this is done,” Agustín asked. “That is an agrarian reform which means something.”
Robert Jordan explained the process of homesteading. He had never thought of it before as an agrarian reform.
“That is magnificent,” Primitivo said. “Then you have a communism in your country?”
“No. That is done under the Republic.”
“For me,” Agustín said, “everything can be done under the Republic. I see no need for other form of government.”
“Do you have no big proprietors?” Andrés asked.
“Many.”
“Then there must be abuses.”
“Certainly. There are many abuses.”
“But you will do away with them?”
“We try to more and more. But there are many abuses still.”
“But there are not great estates that must be broken up?”
“Yes. But there are those who believe that taxes will break them up.”
“How?”
Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. “But the big estates remain. Also there are taxes on the land,” he said.
“But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,” Primitivo said.
“It is possible.”
“Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here.”
“Yes, we will have to fight.”
“But are there not many fascists in your country?”
“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”
“But you cannot destroy them until they rebel?”
“No,” Robert Jordan said. “We cannot destroy them. But we can educate the people so that they will fear fascism and recognize it as it appears and combat it.”
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“In combat there must be discipline. For many things are not as they appear.” — Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“No animal has more liberty than the cat; but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.” — Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“Every damned thing is your own fault if you’re any good.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
“If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comfortable stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
“We have been there in the books and out of the books—and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts, and these now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable. People do not want to do it any more because they will be out of fashion and the lice who crawl on literature will not praise them. Also it is very hard to do. So what?” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
“At a certain age the men writers change into Old Mother Hubbard. The women writers become Joan of Arc without the fighting. They become leaders. It doesn’t matter who they lead. If they do not have followers they invent them. It is useless for those selected as followers to protest. They are accused of disloyalty. Oh, hell. There are too many things that happen to them. That is one thing. The others try to save their souls with what they write. That is an easy way out. Others are ruined by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they find they cannot write, or the first time they cannot do anything else, or they get frightened and join organizations that do their thinking for them. Or they do nor know what they want.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
“It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then, once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop. Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa