“Let us preserve our reputation by performing our engagements; our credit by fulfilling our contracts; and friends by gratitude and kindness; for we know not how soon we may again have occasion for all of them.” – Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Samuel Mather”, May 12, 1784
Category: Lit & Crit
“Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word consider how it is spelt, and if you do not remember it, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.” – Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Martha Jefferson”, November 28, 1783
“I want my poems to have edges. To be more like a photograph than a movie. 35mm, a rule of dimensions: what is and is not in the shot. If you want to include more in the image than will fit, you have to change where you stand. Either that or change the world: Move the saltshaker in front of the woman. Ask her to scoot closer to the light. In the poem, I can pretend the saltshaker was there, or neglect mention of it. The woman can keep moving. I’m writing her in one way, but this is not how it is, she’s already out of the light, and though I call her back, she’s gone. The room is a room and goes around me in every direction, populated with objects I can’t hope to include. I move close to the saltshaker and find that it’s filled with tiny stones. This isn’t true, but I live in the lawless room of the stanza. Every image I write is a lie. I feel guilty and proud.” – Victoria Kornick, “Migraine Season”
“We may destroy our civilization, but we cannot escape it. We may savor a soured remorse at the growth of civilization, but that will yield us no large or lasting reward. There is no turning back: our only way is a radical struggle for the City of the Just.” – Irving Howe, “The City in Literature”
“I have come to be convinced that it is only the unbending observance of custom that sustains life in an urban circumstance.” – Gordon Lish, What I Know So Far
“The suspicion of the city and all it represents seems to run so deeply in our culture that it would be impossible to eradicate it, even if anyone were naive enough to wish to. In its sophisticated variants it is a suspicion necessary for sanity, if only because modern civilization cannot yield very much to its demands. And perhaps, for all we know, it is a suspicion emblematic of some ineradicable tragedy in the human condition: the knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.” – Irving Howe, “The City in Literature”
“The suspicion of artifice and cultivation, the belief in the superior moral and therapeutic uses of the ‘natural,’ the fear that corruption must follow upon a high civilization—such motifs appear to be strongly ingrained in Western Christianity and the civilization carrying it. There are Sodom and Gomorrah. There is the whore of Babylon. There is the story of Joseph and his brothers, charmingly anticipating a central motif within modern fiction: Joseph, who must leave the pastoral setting of his family because he is too smart to spend his life with sheep, prepares for a series of tests, ventures into the court of Egypt, and then, beyond temptation, returns to his fathers. And there is the story of Jesus, shepherd of his flock. Western culture bears, then, a deeply-grounded tradition that sees the city as a place both inimical and threatening. It bears, also, another tradition, both linked and opposed, sacred and secular: we need only remember St. Augustine’s City of God or Aristotle’s view that ‘Men come together in the city in order to live, they remain there in order to live the good life.’ ” – Irving Howe, “The City in Literature”
“In literature the natural is a category of artifice.” – Irving Howe, “The City in Literature”
“One does not regret anything as long as one does not notice what one has lost.“ – Guy de Maupassant, “In the Wood” (trans. McMaster, et al.)
“Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed, as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more disposed to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d, and having more Pride and even Pleasure in killing than in begetting one another; for without a Blush they assemble in great armies at NoonDay to destroy, and when they have kill’d as many as they can, they exaggerate the Number to augment the fancied Glory; but they creep into Corners, or cover themselves with the Darkness of night, when they mean to beget, as being asham’d of a virtuous Action. A virtuous Action it would be, and a vicious one the killing of them, if the Species were really worth producing or preserving; but of this I begin to doubt.” – Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Joseph Priestley”, June 7, 1782
“No one is safe. The world is corrupt. All we can do is dance. “ – Tammy Heejae Lee, “Roe Soup Dance”
“I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free.” – Bob Dylan, “Murder Most Foul”
“From Socrates forward, there are countless witnesses to the value of irony for the private individual: as a complex, serious method of seeking and holding one’s truth, and as a method of saving one’s sanity. But as irony becomes the good taste of what is, after all, an essentially collective activity — the making of art — it may prove less serviceable. One need not speak as categorically as Nietzsche, who thought the spread of irony throughout a culture always signified the floodtide of decadence and the approaching end of that culture’s vitality and powers. In the post-political, electronically connected cosmopolis in which all serious modern artists have taken out premature citizenship, certain organic connections between culture and “thinking” (and art is certainly now, mainly, a form of thinking) may have been broken, so that Nietzsche’s diagnosis no longer applies. Still, there remains a question as to how far the resources of irony can be stretched. It seems unlikely that the possibilities of continually undermining one’s assumptions can go on unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair or by a laugh that leaves one without any breath at all.” – Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”
“Of everything that’s said, one can ask: why? (Including: why should I say that? And: why should I say anything at all?)” – Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”
“A landscape doesn’t demand from the spectator his ‘understanding,’ his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, that he not add anything to it. Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject.” – Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”
“There remains the inescapable truth about perception: the positivity of all experience at every moment of it. As John Cage has insisted, ‘there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.’ (Cage has described how, even in a soundless chamber, he still heard at least two things: his heartbeat and the coursing of the blood in his head). Similarly, there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking there is always something to see. To look at something that’s ’empty’ is still to be looking, still to be seeing something — if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations. In order to perceive fullness, one must retain an acute sense of the emptiness which marks it off; conversely, in order to perceive emptiness, one must apprehend other zones of the world as full.” – Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”
“Is there such an agent as a single agent? Each individual admittedly houses several identities or role-players. Is the agent an individual or does his individuality reside in a part he plays? Is he a cluster of attitudes seen through time, or a single facet caught in action and engagement?” – George Kubler, “Style and Representation of Historical Time”
“As soon as one likes a woman one sincerely believes that they could not get along without her for the rest of their life. One knows that one has felt the same way before and that disgust invariably succeeded gratification; that in order to pass one’s existence side by side with another there must be not a brutal, physical passion which soon dies out, but a sympathy of soul, temperament and temper. One should know how to determine in the enchantment to which one is subjected whether it proceeds from the physical, from a certain sensuous intoxication, or from a deep spiritual charm.” – Guy de Maupassant, “The Model” (trans. McMaster, et al.)
“This is what I know: Some people live to break fragile things, and some people yearn to shatter. Tell me which one you are, and I’ll tell you your kink.” – Daniel Riddle Rodriguez, “How to Be Royal”
“This is what I know: Most men are talkers. They explain everything, answering every question you never asked like it’s their last chance to speak, eyes shiny with desperation. The king’s tongue is a tool for soft power; a whip, a bludgeon, a bucket brigade dumping flora and fauna into my ever-waiting ears.” – Daniel Riddle Rodriguez, “How to Be Royal”
“He had squandered a little money, which action, in a poor family, is one of the greatest crimes. With rich people a man who amuses himself only sows his wild oats. He is what is generally called a sport. But among needy families a boy who forces his parents to break into the capital becomes a good-for-nothing, a rascal, a scamp. And this distinction is just, although the action be the same, for consequences alone determine the seriousness of the act.” – Guy de Maupassant, “My Uncle Jules” (trans. McMaster, et al.)
“Love, my dear, is made up of imperceptible sensations. We know that it is as strong as death, but also as frail as glass. The slightest shock breaks it, and our power crumbles, and we are never able to raise it again.” – Guy de Maupassant, “The Kiss” (trans. McMaster, et al.)
“Treat your Wife always with Respect. It will procure Respect to you, not from her only, but from all that observe it. Never use a slighting Expression to her even in jest; for Slights in Jest after frequent bandyings, are apt to end in angry earnest. Be studious in your Profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least you will by such Conduct stand the best Chance for such Consequences.” – Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to John Alleyne” (August 9, 1768)
“We embarked for Calais with a Number of Passengers who had never been before at Sea. They would previously make a hearty Breakfast, because if the Wind should fail, we might not get over till Supper-time. Doubtless they though that when they had paid for their Breakfast they should have a Right to it, and that when they had swallowed it they were sure of it. But they had scarce been out half an Hour before the Sea laid Claim to it, and they were oblig’d to deliver it up.” – Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Mary Stevenson” (September 14, 1767)
“It sometimes is cloudy, it rains, it hails; again ‘tis clear and pleasant, and the Sun shines on us. Take one thing with another, and the World is a pretty good sort of a World; and ‘tis our Duty to make the best of it and be thankful. One’s true Happiness depends more upon one’s own Judgement of one’s self, on a Consciousness of Rectitude in Action and Intention, and in the Approbation of those few who judge impartially, than upon the Applause of the unthinking undiscerning Multitude, who are apt to cry Hosanna today, and tomorrow, Crucify him.” Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Jane Mecom” (March 1, 1766)
“Who is wise? He that learns from every One.
Who is powerful? He that governs his Passions.
Who is rich? He that is content.
Who is that? Nobody.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1755
“The first Degree of Folly, is to conceit one’s self wise; the second to profess it; the third to despise Counsel.” – Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1754
“Success has ruin’d many a Man.” – Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1752
“Mankind are very odd Creatures: One Half censure what they practise, the other half practise what they censure; the rest always say and do as they ought.” – Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1752
“There are three things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond and to know one’s self.” – Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1750