“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
“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
“The truly moral thing to do during a raging financial inferno is to put it out.” – Timothy Geithner, United States Treasury Secretary (quoted in The Economist, October 14th, 2017)
“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)