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"Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."
-- Douglas Adams
"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."
-- Aeschylus, the Agamemnon
"A small elite are picked by fate to crouch on that knoll above the Little Big Horn, and they provide examples for the many commonplace individuals whose challenge is only a flat tire on a deserted road, the insult of a bully at the beach, or a sneezing spell in the absence of one's nostril spray."
-- Thomas Berger, Little Big Man
"Don't pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods."
-- Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook
"If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed."
-- Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook
"Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back."
-- Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook
"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
-- William Blake
"Demonstration, similitude & harmony are objects of reasoning. Invention, identity & melody are objects of intuition."
-- William Blake
"The man who never traveled to Heaven in his mind or sight is no artist."
-- William Blake
"The mocker of Art is the mocker of Jesus."
-- William Blake
"But in the eyes of a man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself. To me, this world is all one continued vision of fantasy or imagination."
-- William Blake
"I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my brain are studies & chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; and whose works are the delight & study of Archangels. Why, then, should I be anxious about the riches or fame of mortality?"
-- William Blake
"That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care."
-- William Blake
"And I know that this world Is a world of imagination & vision. I see every thing I paint in this world, but every body does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is more beautiful than the sun & a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way."
-- William Blake, letter to the Reverend John Trusler, August 23rd, 1799
"A bonnet is simply an excuse for a feather, a pretext for a spray of flowers, the support for an aigrette, the fastening for a plume of Russian cock's feathers. It is placed on the head, not to protect it, but that it may be seen better. Its great use is to be charming."
-- Charles Blanc, Art in Ornament and Dress, 1877
"Under its worst conditions, this earth is a good place to live in."
-- Henry R. Bowers, letter to his mother, written after a terrible storm as the Scott expedition sailed toward Antarctica. Bowers and three other men died with Scott on the trek back from the pole.
"I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway. Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?"
-- Ray Bradbury
"But then, I guess there is a difference between a work that is injected with the intellectually weighty ideas of the artist, and a 'pretty picture' that nevertheless, (consciously or unconsciously) reflects the ideas and attitudes of its own time -- ideas that now stimulate intellectually weighty study, for us historians."
--
"Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic representation of his Belief about this Universe -- some Critic in a future age ... who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may find this, too, all an 'Allegory', perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation ...."
-- Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship
"History, in Burkhardt's words, is 'the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.' The past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present, and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past. To enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual function of history."
-- Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?
"Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by the great scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen for the buzzing.
-- Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?
"Nothing that has happened is ever really gone. Nothing can move and have being in time without leaving its traces, going on and spreading, getting fainter and fainter like the ripples that move from the point of a stone's impact in some quiet pool."
-- John William Carrington, "The Retrievers"
"On the plains of hesitation,/Lie the bleached bones of thousands./Who on the very threshold of victory/Sat down to rest, /And while resting died."
-- George W. Cecil
"There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight."
-- Lon Chaney, Sr.
"What can we do? We must live our lives. Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through the long procession of days before us, and through the long evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us; we shall work for others without rest, both now and when we are old; and when our last hour comes we shall meet it humbly, and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter, and God will have pity on us. Ah, then dear, dear Uncle, you and I shall see that bright and beautiful life; we shall rejoice and look back upon our sorrow here; a tender smile -- and -- we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. We shall rest."
-- Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, ending lines, spoken by Sonya
"We traveled for science: those three small embryos from Cape Crozier, that weight of fossils from Barkley Island, and that mass of material less spectacular but gathered just as carefully hour by hour, in wind and drift, darkness and cold, was striven for in order that the world may have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead of on what it thinks."
-- Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
"I now see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy which will never be forgotten just because it was a tragedy, tragedy was not our business. In the broad perspective opened up by ten years' distance, I see not one journey to the pole, but two in startling contrast, one to the other. On the one hand, Amundsen: going straight there, getting there first and returning without the loss of a single man. And without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day's work of polar exploration. Nothing more dignified could be imagined. On the other hand, our expedition: running appalling risks, performing prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues; yet, reaching the pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous and leaving our best men dead on the ice."
-- Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
"With all its troubles, it is a good life. We came back from the barrier telling one another we loathed the place, and nothing on earth should make us return. But now the barrier comes back to us, with its clean, open life, and the smell of the cooker, and its soft, sound sleep."
-- Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
"[Council members] Were assembled in the counsail chambre where and when it was shewed by diverse persons and especially by John Sponer, sent unto the feld of Redemore to bring tidinges frome the same to the citie, that King Richard late mercifully reigning upon us was thrugh grete treason of the duc of Northfolk and many othere that turned ayenst hyme, with many othre lordes and nobilles of this north parties, was pitiously slane and murdred to the grete hevynesse of this citie, the names of whome foloweth hereafter."
-- City of York Council Minutes, on the death entry of Richard III, 1485
"He has the mind of an author exactly; some of the simplest things he can't understand."
-- Susie Clemens, age 13, on her father, Mark Twain
"The work is what's important, it's what you leave behind you. That's the reason to get out of bed. That is the contribution. And in seeing things like Venice, you get the inspiration to know things like that can be built. Maybe not on that scale, because it took thousands of people. But still it's possible to create something from your heart, your soul, your gut, your talent... that will move people, as you yourself are moved."
-- Frank Coleman
"Holmes was an eccentric in the Victorian sense, a man with queer hobbies -- cocaine was lamentable but pardonably melodramatic -- whose social code was essentially that of the ruling classes. He was, in a way, the avenging squire of the underworld ready to administer a horsewhipping to the outcasts who were never privileged by birth to receive it from their fathers."
-- Alistair Cooke
(Continued on page 12)
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