“We sometimes think that the historical imagination is the gift of seeing past — seeing past the surface squalors of an era to the larger truths. Really, history is all about seeing in, looking hard at things to bring them back to life as they were, while still making them part of life as it is.” — Adam Gopnik, “Inquiring Minds”
“Originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.” — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”
“Silence is not nothing, it’s something.” – Michel Hazanavicius (quoted by Tad Friend in “Sound of Silence”)
“The dream of being a writer and the crazy price one has to pay for excellence are impossible to demonstrate or, really, even to fathom.” – John Lahr, “A Talent to Abuse”
“Whereas instruction doesn’t always delight, delight always instructs.” — Martin Amis, “Laureate of Terror”
“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him.” – José Saramago, Cain (trans. Costa)
“A wrong note that is played out of élan, you hear it differently than one that is played out of fear.” – Hélène Grimaud (quoted by D. T. Max in “Her Way”)
“Without stories, memory falters; and without memory imagination fails.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “Faces in Time”
“More than love, sex, courtship, and marriage; more than inheritance, ambition, rivalry, or disgrace; more than hatred, betrayal, revenge, or death, orphanhood—the absence of the parent, the frightening yet galvanizing solitude of the child—may be the defining fixation of the novel as a genre, what one might call its primordial motive or matrix, the conditioning psychic reality out of which the form itself develops.” — Terry Castle, “Don’t Pick Up”
“Learning isn’t a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.” — Adam Gopnik, “Broken Kingdom”
“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” – William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863 (quoted in The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote)
“A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.” — Louis Menand, “Browbeaten”
“Remember what Socrates tells Euthyphro, who supposed that the good could be defined by what the gods had willed: if what the gods will is based on some other criterion of goodness, divine will isn’t what makes something good; but if goodness is simply determined by divine will there’s no way for us to assess that judgment. In other words, if you believe that God ordains morality–constitutes it through his will–you still have to decide where God gets morality from. If you are inclined to reply, ‘ Well, God is goodness; He invents it,’ you threaten to turn morality into God’s plaything, and you deprive yourself of any capacity to judge that morality.” — James Wood, “Is That All There Is?” (emphasis in original)
“I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it—that we will do it in our own time and in our own way; that it makes no difference whether it be in one year, or two, or ten, or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper; that we will not cease till the end is attained; that all who do not aid us are enemies, and that we will not account to them for our acts.” – William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863 (quoted in The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote)
“Editing has pushed me to recognize when my own work is not succeeding and how essential revision is to the process. It’s also taught me that belief in a piece is essential to publication. Editing inspires, perhaps even demands, belief in a poem or story, enough to publish work that’s operating at its best quality. Also, to be on this end of the process increases my enthusiasm about submitting my own work and helps me accept any rejections. Because I’ve been in the position of saying, ‘We already have a story about ninja alien cats so while this is a good story, it’s too much ninja alien cats for one issue.’ So in that respect, I’m more accepting of rejection as a natural occurrence in the submissions process. On the flip side though, having edited and sent acceptances, I know it happens, that this isn’t some weird numbers game, that if the work demonstrates quality writing and is a good fit for a journal, it will get accepted.” – Gina Keicher (quoted in “An Interview with the Editors of Salt Hill,” by Roxane Gay)
“Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity. They sit withing their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it’s like out there. Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great unending circles of Otherness that we can barely begin to contemplate.” – Adam Gopnik, “Dog Story”
“In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity.” – Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
“You always know the truth. Wait long enough and the mind will tell you.” – Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
“No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf nor a tree. There’s many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don’t think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice.” – Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
“There has been nothing which I have found to require a greater effort of patience than to bear the criticisms of the ignorant, who pronounce everything a failure which does not equal their expectations or desires, and can see no good result which is not in the line of their own imaginings.” – Jefferson Davis (quoted by Shelby Foote in The Civil War: A Narrative)
“Alexander didn’t torture the Gordian knot when it wouldn’t come untied.” – Lydia Davis, “Kafka Cooks Dinner”
“It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.” — E.H. Carr (quoted by Roger Cohen in “Revealing ‘Turkey’s Hidden Past'”)
“A person has other concerns, but at each moment in its life, a cat has only one concern. This is what gives it such perfect balance, and this is why the spectacle of a confused or frightened cat upsets us: we feel both pity and the desire to laugh. It faces the source of danger or confusion and its only recourse is to spit a foul breath out between its mottled gums.” — Lydia Davis, “The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall”
“Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.” – Adam Gopnik, “Life Studies”
“Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never any good at doing in the first place—relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table. Or having to make a drawing that looks like the thing you’re drawing.” – Adam Gopnik, “Life Studies”
“A plot is the means by which fiction portrays the consequences of actions, but it is not like a pool table; one event never mechanically causes another. In a plot each event provokes other events by making it possible for them to happen–possible but not inevitable, because human beings are always free to choose their response to provocation.” — Edward Mendelson, “The Perils of His Magic Circle” (emphasis in original)
“Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.” — Rebecca West, “Pounce”
“I have never felt jealous of other women because they were more beautiful than I was, for almost any cat was far more beautiful than either me or them.” — Rebecca West, “Pounce”
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers.” – Tony Judt, “Ill Fares the Land” (emphasis in original)
“Everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.” – Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent