“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
Category: Lit & Crit
“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)
“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 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
“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”
“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
“It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (emphasis in original)
“Civilised society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“The life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“In one’s dealings with the young it behoves one to display the scientific spirit, to exhibit the principles of enlightenment—not only for purposes of mental discipline, but on the human and individual side, in order not to wound them or indirectly offend their political sensibilities; particularly in these days, when there is so much tinder in the air, opinions are so frightfully split up and chaotic, and you may so easily incur attacks from one party or the other, or even give rise to scandal, by taking sides on a point of history.” – Thomas Mann, Disorder and Early Sorrow (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“The past is immortalized; that is to say, it is dead; and death is the root of all godliness and all abiding significance.” – Thomas Mann, Disorder and Early Sorrow (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“The capacity for self-surrender . . . for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command. Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.” – Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“Freedom exists, and also the will exists, but freedom of the will does not exist, for a will that aims at its own freedom aims at the unknown.” – Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“Children are a human species and a society apart, a nation of their own, so to speak. On the basis if their common form of life, they find each other out with the greatest ease, no matter how different their small vocabularies.” – Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“If you care too much about what you have to say, if your heart is too much in it, you can be pretty sure of making a mess.” – Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)