Literature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 12

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Q2081

DriveLiterature

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The question is usually quoted on its own, where it sounds like a challenge to achieve something. In the poem it arrives after twelve quiet lines spent watching a single grasshopper — her jaws moving side to side, her enormous complicated eyes, the sugar taken from Oliver's hand. Oliver walked the woods of Provincetown most mornings with a notebook in her pocket. The question earns its force from the attention that comes before it.

Mary Oliver, 'The Summer Day', House of Light (1990)Read card

Q2082

StillnessLiterature

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

It is quoted as consolation. Didion meant it as a diagnosis. The essay opens with the sentence and then describes a year in which the stories stopped working for her: she reproduces her own psychiatric report from 1968, which found a personality in retreat from a world perceived as chaotic. We impose narrative on disparate images, she writes, because the alternative is to see the images as they actually are.

Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)Read card

Q2083

DriveLiterature

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

The sentence has a second half that rarely travels with it: 'What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.' Dillard is writing about timetables, not destiny. A schedule, she says, is a net for catching days, a scaffolding you climb inside so that the work happens whether or not you feel like it. She wrote the book in a cinder-block study with the view taped over.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)Read card

Q2084

DriveLiterature

Once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.

Heaney wrote this chorus for his version of a Sophocles play, staged in 1990 while Northern Ireland was still at war with itself. The lines directly before it are the ones people forget: 'History says, don't hope on this side of the grave.' The famous half only means anything because of that refusal. Politicians have quoted it ever since, usually the hopeful part, and Heaney was wary of how easily it was borrowed.

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (1990)Read card

Q2085

StillnessLiterature

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'

Vonnegut credited the habit to his uncle Alex, who complained that people never notice when they are happy. So Alex made a ritual of it. In the shade of an apple tree, drinking lemonade, he would interrupt himself to say the words aloud. Vonnegut repeated the instruction for the rest of his life, in graduation speeches and in print — a man who had survived the firebombing of Dresden recommending that you say something out loud about lemonade.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (2005)Read card

Q2086

StillnessLiterature

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'

Szymborska's Nobel lecture is largely a defence of not knowing. Inspiration, she said, is not reserved for poets: it visits doctors, teachers and gardeners, anyone who keeps finding new questions in work they have done a thousand times. Against them she set the people who are certain — tyrants, fanatics, demagogues — for whom knowledge arrives once, complete, and never has to be revisited. She had lived in Poland under both.

Wisława Szymborska, Nobel Lecture (1996)Read card

Q2087

WonderLiterature

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Borges was made director of Argentina's National Library in 1955. By then an inherited eye disease had taken most of his sight, and he could no longer read the books he was now in charge of — some 800,000 of them. The poem calls this God's magnificent irony: granting him books and night in the same gesture. He learned poems by heart instead, and dictated the rest of his work.

Jorge Luis Borges, 'Poem of the Gifts', Dreamtigers (1960)Read card

Q2088

StillnessLiterature

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to tell it.

This is the epigraph García Márquez chose for his own memoir, and it doubles as a warning to the reader: what follows has been shaped. The book turns on a single journey he made at twenty-two, going back with his mother to sell the family house in Aracataca. Walking through the abandoned rooms of his childhood, he later said, he understood what kind of writer he was going to be.

Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale (2002)Read card

Q2089

DriveLiterature

You must change your life.

The poem describes a broken statue in a museum: no head, no arms, no eyes to meet. Rilke spends thirteen lines arguing that the stone still looks back, that it burns from inside like a lamp turned low — and then, with no warning, the last line stops describing and gives an order. He wrote it after two years as secretary to the sculptor Rodin, who had told him to go to the zoo and look at an animal until he could really see it.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (1908)Read card

Q2090

StillnessLiterature

I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Eight lines long, and the whole poem is an apology for having nothing. The speaker wishes he owned the embroidered cloths of heaven to lay at her feet; being poor, he has only his dreams. Yeats published it in 1899 under the name Aedh, one of three masks he used in that collection, and later quietly dropped the mask. He had proposed to Maud Gonne and been refused, and would be refused three more times.

W.B. Yeats, 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' (1899)Read card

Q2091

DriveLiterature

'Can you describe this?' And I said: 'I can.'

Akhmatova spent seventeen months in the queues outside a Leningrad prison, waiting for news of her son. One day a woman with blue-tinged lips recognised her, leaned in and whispered the question — everyone in those queues whispered. This exchange became the preface to 'Requiem', her poem cycle about the terror. For years it existed nowhere but in the memories of a few trusted friends, who learned it by heart so that no page could be found.

Anna Akhmatova, 'Instead of a Preface', Requiem (1957)Read card

Q2092

StillnessLiterature

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Pessoa worked as a commercial translator in Lisbon and wrote under more than seventy invented names, each with a biography and a style of its own. This book belongs to Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who never leaves the city. Pessoa left it as thousands of loose, undated sheets in a wooden trunk. It was first assembled and published in 1982, forty-seven years after his death, and no two editions agree on the order.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietRead card

Q2095

StillnessPhilosophy

If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us!

Kenkō was a court official who became a Buddhist monk and spent his later years writing short, unconnected pieces on whatever crossed his mind — manners, moonlight, the correct way to be old. Adashino was a burial ground outside Kyoto, so notorious for the brief lives it held that its dew became shorthand for transience. His argument is not resignation. It is that the value of anything is inseparable from the fact that it ends.

Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness (c. 1330)Read card

Q2113

DriveLiterature

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

Bradbury had no money for an office, so he wrote 'Fahrenheit 451' in the typing room of a university library basement, on a machine that ran on coins: ten cents bought half an hour. The clock made him write fast, and every time it stopped he went upstairs and walked between the shelves. The first draft cost him nine dollars and eighty cents. He was thirty-three and had a book about the burning of books.

Ray Bradbury, introduction to Fahrenheit 451 (2003 edition)Read card

Q2114

DriveLiterature

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

Hughes was barely into his twenties when he wrote this, and had already left Columbia University after a year of being treated as an intruder there. He worked as a delivery boy, a mess boy on a freighter to West Africa, a cook in a Paris nightclub. The poem is eight short lines and refuses to promise the dreams will come true — only that a life without them cannot get off the ground.

Langston Hughes, 'Dreams'Read card

Q2119

DriveLiterature

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to gather wood — teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Saint-Exupéry never wrote this sentence. Its earliest known appearance in print is a 1995 American diet book, where it is offered as an anonymous proverb, and his name was attached to it around 2007 by way of management seminars. The idea does echo a passage in 'Citadelle', the sprawling book found unfinished after his plane disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944. A good line, then, with a slightly embarrassing passport.

Widely attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; a later paraphraseRead card

Q2122

StillnessLiterature

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The fox says it as a parting gift, after teaching the prince that the time he wasted on his rose is exactly what makes the rose his. Saint-Exupéry wrote the book in New York, in exile, grounded and miserable, and drew the watercolours himself. In July 1944 he flew a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean and did not return. His silver identity bracelet was pulled from the sea in 1998; the wreck was identified in 2004.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)Read card

Q2125

StillnessHistory

When Alamut fell in 1256, the Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvayni was given the run of its famous library — he kept the books he approved of and burned the rest.

Juvayni was riding with the Mongol conqueror Hulagu, and he was also a scholar who understood exactly what he was holding. He selected what he considered worth saving, then destroyed the Ismaili theology he had no use for — and afterwards wrote the history in which we read about it. Almost everything we know of the collection comes from the person who ended it. A handful of works escaped, including treatises by the astronomer al-Tusi. The rest survives only as a description by the man with the torch.

Ata-Malik JuvayniRead card

Q2127

StillnessLiterature

Nizam al-Mulk's Siyasatnama, the Book of Government, sets out in fifty chapters how a ruler should handle religion, soldiers, money, courtiers and informers.

It was written late, by a man who had already done the job, and it reads that way: less theory than accumulated practice, illustrated with stories of rulers who got it right or badly wrong. It is unsentimental about power — the ruler's authority should be absolute, the informants should be good, the treasury should be watched. Written nine centuries ago about a vanished empire, it survives because most of what it describes is not medieval at all.

SiyasatnamaRead card

Q2130

WonderHistory

A beloved Persian story has Omar Khayyam, Nizam al-Mulk and Hassan-i Sabbah swear a boyhood pact to share whatever success came to them — but the three were never classmates.

The pact is irresistible: three boys under one master in Nishapur, promising that whoever rose first would lift the others, and each becoming a different kind of legend — the poet, the statesman, the revolutionary. It appears in several classical Persian sources and almost every retelling since. It also cannot have happened. Nizam al-Mulk was a generation older than Khayyam, and Hassan-i Sabbah did not come from Nishapur. Some stories survive because they are true, and some because they are better than true.

Three SchoolfellowsRead card