The Art of Tetman Callis

“Pneumococci are great levelers of vanity and ambition.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters

[Read more →]

“The best way to do good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” — Benjamin Franklin (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXIV, Sec. 3)

[Read more →]

“A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.”  — James Madison (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXIII, Sec. 18)

[Read more →]

“The knowledge of what tends neither directly nor indirectly to make better men and better citizens is but a knowledge of trifles. It is not learning but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness.” — The Rev. Dr. William Smith (Provost, University of Pennsylvania, 1755-1779), quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, [...]

[Read more →]

“Learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world and printing has divulged them and libels against the best of governments. God keep us from both.” — Sir William Berkeley (Governor of Virginia, 1641-1677), quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXIII, Sec. 3

[Read more →]

“To despair was to wish back for something already lost.  Or to prolong what was already unbearable.  How much can you wish for a favorite warm coat that hangs in the closet of a house that burned down with your mother and father inside of it?  How long can you see in your mind arms [...]

[Read more →]

“The man who serves is the one who comes to understand other men.” — Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXII, Sec. 9

[Read more →]

“Gradually public opinion concerning the scope and purpose of government in its relation to the general welfare underwent a transformation. The view which had long been dominant was that national prosperity depended upon the prosperity of the manufacturing and commercial classes of the country; when they flourished the labourer would enjoy a ‘full dinner pail,’ [...]

[Read more →]

“It’s in words that the magic is—Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the rest—but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next.  The real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what; the trick is to learn the trick.” — John Barth, “Dunyazadiad”

[Read more →]

“You cannot conjure madness out of a cabbage.  You cannot craze a block of wood with an axe.  You cannot blow the brains from a squash.  You cannot sell such a fine fierce commodity as madness and pass it over a grocer’s counter.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters

[Read more →]

“Women fall in love when they get to know you.  Men are just the opposite.  When they finally know you they’re ready to leave.” — James Salter, “American Express”

[Read more →]

“It’s a strange horrific world and while it hurts it fascinates.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters

[Read more →]

“I am like the middleclass housewife who drapes her house with plush horrors: I festoon myself with small beasts and give them to eat and suck and warm them.  I am a truly generous mound of flesh.  I daily lay down my life not for my friends but for those hungry little persons I have [...]

[Read more →]

“If in war time the theatre has made itself necessary, does it not follow that some day the Government, regarding the theatre as a necessary social institution for the American people, will give it Congressional support in its artistic maintenance, and recognize its importance by having it represented in the Presidential Cabinet by a Secretary [...]

[Read more →]

“Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.” — William H. Gass, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”

[Read more →]

“I shall not give sanctuary to suspicion, for it eats the bowels like a slow acid.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters

[Read more →]

“Love is infinite and one.  Women are not.  Neither are men.  The human condition.  Nearly unbearable.” — Leonard Michaels, “City Boy”

[Read more →]

“In a crisis you discover everything.  Then it’s too late.  Know yourself, indeed.  You need a crisis every day.” — Leonard Michaels, “City Boy”

[Read more →]

“Old men are just as bad as young men when it comes to money.  They can’t think.  They always try to buy what they should have for free.  And what they buy, after they have it, is nothing.” — James Alan McPherson, “A Solo Song: For Doc”

[Read more →]

“The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.” — Freya Stark (quoted in “East Is West” by Claudia Roth Pierpont)

[Read more →]

“The great and tragic fact of experience is the fact of effort and passionate toil which never finds complete satisfaction. This eternal frustration of our ideals or will is an essential part of spiritual life, and enriches it just as the shadows enrich the picture or certain discords bring about richer harmony.” — Morris R. [...]

[Read more →]

“Commonly we fix beliefs by reiterating them, by surrounding them with emotional safeguards, and by avoiding anything which casts doubt upon them—by ‘the will to believe.’ This method breaks down when the community ceases to be homogeneous. Social effort, by the method of authority, to eliminate diversity of beliefs also fails in the end to [...]

[Read more →]

“Intellectual pioneers are rarely gregarious creatures. In their isolation they lose touch with those who follow the beaten paths, and when they return to the community they speak strangely of strange sights, so that few have the faith to follow them and change their trails into high roads.” — Morris R. Cohen, The Cambridge History [...]

[Read more →]

“Out of unrestricted competition arise many wrongs that the State must redress and many abuses which it must check. It may become the duty of the State to reform its taxation, so that its burdens shall rest less heavily upon the lower classes; to repress monopolies of all sorts; to prevent and punish gambling; to [...]

[Read more →]

“Dishonest men can be bought and ignorant men can be manipulated. This is the kind of government which private capital, invested in public-service industries, naturally feels that it must have.” — Washington Gladden (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XVI, Sec. 12)

[Read more →]

“While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.  There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” — James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

[Read more →]

“The beginning of everything is damp and small, but wide-armed oaks—according to myth, legend, and the folk tales of the people—from solitary acorns grow.” — Grace Paley, “In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All”

[Read more →]

“Doctors mostly sustain themselves in a medium of false ideas, the word ‘doctor’ casting about them, so they think, a sort of magical aura.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

[Read more →]

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (emphasis in original)

[Read more →]

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

[Read more →]