∞ Commonplace books are things of the past, it seems. Washington and Jefferson each kept one, TF throughout his life. When other, less imaginative teaching and entertainments replaced books, people stopped jotting down wise or profound words they could refer to again and again. When I taught fiction writing, I had the class keep a commonplace book an entire semester. I think 3 of 23 had more than five pages filled. When one kid read something from a comic book, I wanted to hit him.
My latest jotted quotes appear below, and will grow as the days disappear in the wake that is life on the move. It’s fun for a writer to hand-write the words of kin and the masters. He and she come to understand what words feel like on the fingertips, to the eyes, read silently with lips moving, how they smell on the page.
The mind flares.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
march 12, 2008
“None that speak of me know me […] and when they do speak, they slander me; those who know me keep silent and in their silence do not defend me; thus, all speak ill of me until they meet me, but when they meet me they find rest, and they bring me salvation, for I never rest.”
–Javier Marías, “Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me”
march 10, 2008
“Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference—with words.”
–Elizabeth Hardwick, “Grub Street: New York” (NYRB, Feb. 1, 1963)
february 7, 2008
“… since their childhood he had resented, wihout saying it, her [Hester’s] interference, her indignation on his behalf, her possessiveness. He had forgiven what she couldn’t help, doing so as natural in him as scorn and prickliness were in her. She had never noticed, had never been aware of how he felt.”
– William Trevor, “Faith”
february 1, 2008
“I must lead the life of a savage …. The people have my sympathy. I must turn to them directly, … and they must provide me with a living … so that their judgeement won’t be influenced by gratitude. They are right. I am eager to learn and to that end I will be so outrageous that I’ll give everyone the power to tell me the cruelest truths.”
– Gustave Courbet, “Letters”
december 16, 2007
“The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.”
– Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollack (27 January, 1904)
november 30, 2007
Though most of them aren’t much to
write about—
mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked
pale cigars,
the tint and stink recalling Tuesday’s
meal,
the texture loose and soon dissolved—
this one,
struck off in solitude one afternoon
(that prairie stretch before the late light
fails)
with no distinct sensation, sweet or
pained,
of special inspiration or release,
was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil,
unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter
who worked in this most frail, least
grateful clay
had set himself to shape a topaz vase.
O spiral perfection, not seashell nor
stardust, how can I keep you? With this
poem.
– John Updike, “The Beautiful Bowel Movement”
november 27, 2007
“As any old Taoist walking out of the woods can tell you, simple-minded does not necessarily mean stupid. It’s rather significant that the Taoist ideal is that of the still, calm, reflecting ‘mirror-mind’ of the Uncarved Block.”
“When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun.”
– Benjamin Hoff, “the Tao of Pooh”
november 26, 2007
“[A]s Proust would have maintained, the construction of memories themselves, and their arrangement into a logical and understandable order, may make them fictional, but also makes them worth reading about.”
– Jane Smiley, “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel”
november 23, 2007
“If my daily dose of literature is something I myself am writing, it’s all very different. Because for those who share my affliction, the best cure of all, and the greatest source of happiness, is to write a good half page every day.”
– Orhan Pamuk, “The Implied Author” (in “Other Colors: Essays and a story”)
july 26, 2007
“It came to him then that probably one of the best things, or at least one of the simplest good things, you could do with your mortal life would be to pick out one absolutely first-rate deserving person and do everything you could conceive of in the world to make her happy, as best you might, and never be an adversary on small things, be more forthcoming than might be comfortable for you, hide anger and even justified irritation . . . always wait sexually . . . . And the idea was to let this single flower bloom without notifying her of what was going on. Because it would be on the order of a present because it was only fair reciprocation for someone who enthralled you and who had incidentally saved you from your demons.”
– Norman Rush, “Mortals”
may 14, 2007
“Once I thought the truth was gonna set me free
But now I feel the chains of its responsibility
I will not be a puppet I cannot play it safe
I’ll give myself away with a blind and simple faith
I’m just the same as you I just do the best I can
That’s the only answer…for an ordinary man
Once I thought the truth was gonna set me free
But now I feel the chains of its responsibility
I will not be a puppet I cannot play it safe
I’ll give myself away with a blind and simple faith
I’m just the same as you I just do the best I can
That’s the only answer…for an ordinary man”
– Triumph, “Ordinary Man”
may 13, 2007
“‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President Burr tells Schuyler, ‘the man who does not know where he is going goes farthest.’”
– Gore Vidal, “Burr”
april 26, 2007
“19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEAR
Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet—shallon, shalop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble—like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day she would be left silent.”
– Nicole Krauss, “The History of Love”
april 17, 2007
All alone or in twos
the ones who really love you
walk up and down outside the wall
some hand in hand
some gathered together in bands
the bleeding hearts of the artists make their stand.
And when they’ve given you their all
some stagger and fall after all it’s not easy
banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.
– Roger Waters, “Outside the Wall”
march 31, 2007
“I once said, ‘Others brag of the books they’ve managed to write; I brag of the books I’ve managed to read.’ I don’t know if I am a good writer, but I think I am an excellent reader, or in any case, a sensitive and grateful one.”
“A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Prologues to A Personal Library” in “Selected Non-Fictions”
march 29, 2007
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
– Oscar Wilde, “Aphorisms”
march 18, 2007
THE VOICE
Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where
Latin ashes and the dust of Greece
mingled with novels, history, and verse
in one dark Babel. I was folio-high
when I first heard the voices. ‘All the world,’
said one, insidious but sure, ‘is cake—
let me make you an appetite to match,
and then your happiness need have no end.’
And the other: ‘Come, O come with me in dreams
beyond the possible, beyond the known!’
That second voice sang like the wind in the reeds,
a wandering phantom out of nowhere, sweet
to hear yet somehow horrifying too.
‘Now and forever!’ I answered, whereupon
my wound was with me—ever since, my Fate:
behind the scenes, the frivolous decors
of all existence, deep in the abyss,
I see distinctly other, brighter worlds;
yet victimized by what I know I see,
I sense the serpent coiling at my heels;
and therefore, like the prophets, from that hour
I’ve loved the wilderness, I’ve loved the sea;
no ordinary sadness touches me
though I find savor in the bitterest wine;
how many truths I trade away for lies,
and musing on heaven, stumble over trash …
Even so, the voice consoles me: ‘Keep your dreams,
the wise have none so lovely as the mad.’
– Charles Baudelaire, “Le Fleurs du Mal”
march 16, 2007
“… human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That—that is the raison d’etre of the art of the novel.”
“[the novel] has its own morality (Herman Broch said it: the novel’s sole morality is knowledge; a novel that fails to reveal some hitherto unknown bit of existence is immoral; thus ‘getting into the soul of things’ and setting a good example are two different and irreconcilable purposes); it has its specific relation to the author’s ’self’ (in order to hear the secret, barely audible, voice of ‘the soul of things,’ the novelist, unlike the poet or the musician, must know how to silence the cries of his own soul); it has its timespan for creation (the writing of a novel takes up a whole era in a writer’s life, and when the labor is done he is no longer the person he was at the start); it opens itself to the world beyond its national language …”
“Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible.”
– Milan Kundera, “The Curtain”
march 11, 2007
“From childhood on, it is easy to identify those characters in your immediate environment who can make your life worse. The Trouble. They are not generally the combustibles. They will explode in your face, then calm down and befriend you. The trouble is the quiet ones, the beady ones, the watchful ones. You can smell the malignity reeking off them.”
“Malvolio from ‘Twelfth Night’, the man more in need of a blow job than any character in literature. Angelo from ‘Measure for Measure’, the repressed rapist, who preaches bogus Christian values, the exemplar of Jack Nicholson’s great phrase, ‘Show me a businessman with a combination lock on his briefcase, and I’ll show you a man who wants to piss in a prostitute’s mouth.’”
– Dominic Dromgoole, “Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life”
march 10, 2007
“Precisely because America is legally secular, religion has become free enterprise. Rival churches compete for congregations—not least for the fat tithes that they bring—and the competition is waged with all the aggressive hard-sell techniques of the marketplace. What works for soap flakes works for God, and the result is something approaching religious mania among today’s less educated classes.”
– Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”
march 7, 2007
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
– Macbeth, Act V, Scene V
“As with all experiences of happiness that are too good, one mourns moment by moment their passing. The Sweetness of the instant cannot last. The height of its present beauty only accentuates the depth of the disappointment that will follow. To see a child so full of joy is life’s simplest treasure; to know that a child cannot feel the same for ever its sharpest disappointment.”
– Dominic Dromgoole, “Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life”
march 6, 2007
Anecdote from William IV Street
A foreign young lady enters the publisher’s warehouse
And asks for Volume XXIV of the Complete Works of Freud.
(This being the Index, at last, which directs the reader
To a wealth of unconscious desires he might otherwise miss.)
“I also require”, says the lady, extending an elegant arm,
“A statue of Jesus Christ standing approximately this high.”
– D. J. ENRIGH, “Anecdote from William IV Street”
february 1, 2007
“There remained the problem of what to say. Women’s learning was limited, and any personalization in discussion was considered dangerous. It was essential to avoid drawing attention to oneself, since individual identity depended primarily on social identity and every word could be treacherous: ‘Whatsoever the distinction, it attracts the attention of men; their interest engenders talk, and such talk, whether advantageous or disagreeable, flatters or tickles the vanity, thus giving rise to temptations capable of leading to various mistakes.’”
– Benedetta Craveri, “The Age of Conversation”
january 23, 2007
“One day, in St. James’s Park, [Beckett] was moved almost to tears by the sight of ‘a little boy playing at “empty buses” with a nurse who had exactly the same quality of ruined granite expression as mine had before she married her gardener.’ He quickly mocked his own nostalgia, but viewed his sentimental overreaction as a worrying symptom. ‘I’m depressed,’ he wrote, ‘the way a slug-ridden cabbage might be expected to be.’”
– James Knowlsen, “Damned to Fame”
january 11, 2007
New Life is breathed
Upon the glass,
That which was not
Has come to pass.
A child is born,
An old man gone.
Father forsaken,
Forgive thy son.
– James Joyce, “Ecce Puer”
january 2, 2007
“She was thinking: ‘To be instructively wounded is the most one can ask of love. What innocents we were! Now I see it all so clearly. Some marriages just smoulder along, others chime by couples, but in ours we were blissed out. What luck! But how hard to pick oneself up after such a knockdown blow. What now? I shall live alone like Aubrey, sleep alone, on my right side, pointing north-south; yes, quite alone.”
– Lawrence Durrell, “Constance”
december 30, 2006
“There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.”
– Philip Roth, “The Human Stain”
december 29, 2006
“Romantic love has been regarded as, at best, a brief prelude to more stable, ambivalent love; once reality intervenes and one gets to know the other as he or she ‘really’ is, the idealization that fuels the illusions of romantic love is no longer possible. Romantic desire might point the way, but many experts considered it a dangerous and unstable basis for shaping a life.”
“But our narcissistic self-love serves always as a foil to, a ready retreat from, the vicissitudes of our dealings with others: Who can possibly love us as well and as dependably as we love ourselves?”
– Stephen A. Mitchell, “Can Love Last?: the fate of romance over time”
december 20, 2006
“Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century.”
“It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources.”
“Bertrand Russell got here first: ‘Apart from logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H bomb.’”
“The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.”
– Sam Harris, “The End of Faith”
july 14, 2006
“Once I had a therapist who told me that paranoia comes from having been constantly criticized as a child. You come to think that whatever you do has enormous importance, when really nothing could be farther from the truth. Blessedly, people are wrapped up in their own lives and don’t care much about what everyone else is doing. But for a paranoiac such as myself, this is only marginal comfort. I know I’m being paranoid and I still can’t stop it.”
– Magdalena Alagna, “The Disquested Muse” Blog
may 28, 2006
“So many old bourgeois people live on and on, and can’t die, because they have never been in life at all. Death’s not sad, when one has lived.”
– D.H. Lawrence, (Letters V: 292-3)
may 21, 2006
“I write a little bit every day, without hope and without despair.”
– Isak Dinesen, “The Art of Fiction” in Paris Review, 1958
may 20, 2006
“Michelangelo: How do you know Dante did not feel that Brutus and Cassius did wrong in killing Caesar? Don’t you know how much ruin and misery came into the world as a result of his death? Don’t you see what a calamitous succession of emperors followed him? Would it not have been better if he had lived and carried out his ideas?
Donato: The one idea he had was to be called ‘King.’
Michelangelo: I grant you that. But wasn’t that a lesser evil than what followed? How do you know that Caesar would not in time have tired of ruling and like Sulla restored freedom to the country and reconstituted the Republic? Now, if by continuing to live, he had done that, would not Brutus and Cassius have committed a great wrong in killing him? It is an act of great presumption to set out to kill the head of a state, whether he be just or unjust, for no one knows for certain what good can come of his death, and there is always the hope that some good can come of his remaining alive. For that reason I am considerably annoyed by people who believe that there can be no good unless it begins with some act of evil—that is, with a few deaths. They don’t understand that times change, that unforeseen developments may arise, and that men get tired and change their minds. Out of all that it often happens— without anybody ardently hoping and striving and risking his life for it—that the very good will come about which many have thought desirable….”
– “Was Dante Right to Consign Brutus and Cassius to Hell for Murdering Julius Caesar?”, The Book of Great Conversations, ed. Louis Biancolli
may 17, 2006
“Characters, Elizabeth Bowen once said, are not created by writers. They pre-exist and they have to be found. If we do not find them, if we fail to represent them, the fault is ours. It must be admitted, however, that finding them is not easy. The condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define. Those who tell us that we are in an early stage of universal history must be right. We are being lavishly poured together and seem to be experiencing the anguish of new states of consciousness.”
– Saul Bellow, Nobel Lecture, 1976
may 16, 2006
“It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
‘…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.’
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the ‘lay genius’ Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
‘…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.’
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor—are brazenly pragmatic.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
may 15, 2006
“And this is understandable, given the nature of their work, which force them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.”
– W.G. Sebald, “The Rings of Saturn”
may 12, 2006
“Small children love this kind of storytelling because although terrible things may occur in fairy tales, the terrible is always wrapped in the continuing consolation that the terrible cannot be explained, and that it thus has no connection with our lived world. The childishness of magical realism has to do with its pre-psychological certainty: for the child, there is little difference between “They all lived happily ever after” and “They all lived unhappily ever after.” The consolation is that neither state will fail because neither can explain itself.”
– James Wood, “The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief”
april 24, 2006
“For me, one good reading of one good passage is worth as much as anything there is, because the person achieving it is living life fully in that time. The absurdity of this notion will be evident to everyone, but it seems only honest to get it out in the open from the beginning. Perhaps I should just add that I do not see how any such person can prove useless in the world.”
– Wayne C. Booth, “A Rhetoric of Irony”
april 18, 2006
“Then one day a friend took his photograph on the steps of the Senate House and Wittgenstein asked him where he was to stand. ‘Oh, roughly there.’ the friend replied, casually indicating a spot. Wittgenstein went back to his room, lay on the floor and writhed in excitement. Roughly there. The phrase had opened a world to him. Not ‘two inches to the left of that stone,’ but ‘roughly there’. Human life was a matter of roughness, not of precise measurement. Why had he not understood this? He had tried to purge language of its ambiguities, but this was like regarding the handle of a cup as a flaw in the pottery. Looseness and ambiguity were not imperfections, they were what made things work.”
“Hitler learnt much from the fanatical anti-Semitism of Karl Luger, mayor of Vienna. To live and let live was essential for survival, but it could never in itself redeem the sufferings of the oppressed. For that one would need the violent, intolerable love of Yahweh, who did not exist. Like philosophy, God was a disease of the mind we could not escape, an impossible dream of wholeness. Only an implacable force could redeem the wretchedness of humanity, and this would merely plunge it into deeper misery.”
– Terry Eagleton, “Saints and Scholars”
march 23, 2006
“The sense of adventure that surrounded their love-making (if such is the term that applies here) was heightened further by the presence often of the four parents in some other part of the house, or out on the back terrace, drinking iced tea and gabbing. While buggering Sharon on the floor beneath the ping-pong table in the basement of her parents’ house, Zuckerman would call out from time to time, ‘Nice shot,’ or ‘Nice return, Sharon’—even as the feverish young girl whispered up from the canine position, ‘Oh it’s so strange. It hurts, but it doesn’t hurt. Oh Nathan, it’s so strange.’ ”
– Philip Roth, “My Life as a Man”
february, 2006
“Miss Carter turned to look at him. Her eyes were hidden behind the dark glasses. Now she’ll despise me, thought Mor. She’ll despise me for telling the lie, and she’ll despise me for telling her that I told it.”
– Iris Murdoch, “The Sandcastle”
january, 2006
“On the whole travel at its best is rather comfortless, but travel is never easy: you get very tired, you get lost, you get your feet wet, you get little co-operation, and—if it is to have any value at all— you go alone. Homesickness is part of this kind of travel. In these circumstances, it is possible to make interesting discoveries about oneself and one’s surroundings. Travel has less to do with distance than with insight: it is, very often, a way of seeing.”
– Paul Theroux, “Stranger on a Train.”
september, 2005
“When a warm heart has received strong impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly tracing them. I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten,—nor looks I have felt in every nerve, which I shall never more meet.”
– Mary Wolstonecraft, “A Short Residence”
may, 2005
“Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind.”
– José Saragamo, “Blindness”
april, 2005
“He knew he needed to think, but what exactly did he need to think about.”
– Michel Houellbecq, “The Elementary Particles”
april, 2005
“…you can’t say that anyone is really happy. If anyone is, then the sensation is fleeting, and sparkles away. How much stronger, more distinct, more lasting, is the sensation of unhappiness.”
– James Wood, “The Book Against God”
january, 2005
“I’ll bet if we met the devil and he allowed us to open him up, we might be surprised to find God jumping out. Pastor still liked to provoke Jesus with these outrageous remarks. Jesus had gradually learned that the best way to deal with this was ignore it and say nothing. For Pastor might have gone even further, suggesting that on opening up God one might find the devil inside.”
“Smiling at this renewal of the world, they bare rotten teeth, but it’s the thought that counts.”
– José Saragamo, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ”
december, 1995; october 1999; july 2004
“Was something saying I should kill myself posthaste if the truth was that I was going to be mediocre? This was a thought with real pain behind it. To my wreck of a mother mediocre was a superlative—an imputation I resisted with all my might once I realized it involved me. I grew up clinging to the idea that either I was original in an unappreciated way or that I could be original— this later—by incessant striving and reading and taking simple precautions like never watching television again in my life.”
– Norman Rush, “Mating”
