Literature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

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StillnessLiterature

I've had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can't quite make out what it is. It takes time.

The line comes from one of Bukowski's letters, collected in Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960–1970 (1993). In those years he worked as a filing clerk at the Los Angeles post office and wrote poems for small magazines; in 1969 the publisher John Martin offered to support him so that he could write full time, and novels such as Post Office (1971) and Factotum (1975) followed. Here, with his usual bluntness, he admits that after so much hurt even kindness takes him a while to recognise.

Charles Bukowski (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Baby, I'm a genius, but nobody knows it but me.

Factotum (1975), Bukowski's second novel, follows Henry Chinaski, the fictional stand-in he used for himself, through the 1940s. Rejected for military service in the Second World War, Chinaski drifts between low-paid jobs across America, drinks, gets fired and keeps sending stories to the one publisher he respects, which keeps rejecting them. The title, from the Latin for “do everything”, means someone who does all kinds of odd jobs. Against all that failure, his boast is both a joke at his own expense and real faith in his writing.

Charles Bukowski (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Before you and me there were nights and days, and the turning sky was already at its work. Wherever you set your foot upon the earth, it was once the pupil of a lovely eye.

Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was born in Nishapur, north-eastern Iran, and in his lifetime was famous as a mathematician and astronomer: he solved cubic equations with geometry and helped create the Jalali calendar. Later centuries credited him with hundreds of rubais, poems of four lines, many probably by other poets; a modern critical edition counts a version of this one as probably his. Its thought runs through the collection: the dust we walk on was once living people, and the sky turned before us. The translation is our own.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

In the rotten fascist context of what was happening to America in 1969, being a freak was an honourable way to go.

Thompson said this in a long Playboy interview published in November 1974, later collected in Ancient Gonzo Wisdom (2009), while talking about his 1970 run for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, home of the ski town of Aspen. Long-haired young people who rejected mainstream America then proudly called themselves freaks, and Thompson ran on a “Freak Power” ticket, promising to turn Aspen's streets into grassy walkways and rename the town “Fat City” to deter investors. He carried Aspen itself but lost the county with 44 per cent of the vote.

Attributed to Hunter S. Thompson; primary source not yet locatedRead card

StillnessLiterature

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

The joke first appeared, unsigned, in Success Magazine in May 1908, eight years after Wilde's death, and newspapers reprinted it within weeks. In 1934 the humorist Olin Miller used it in his column. The link to Wilde probably comes from a 1947 anthology, A Little Book of Aphorisms, which printed it marked “Anon.” directly beneath a genuine Wilde quotation, so a hasty reader could take both for his. By 1955 a handbook of epigrams credited it to him outright. The Quote Investigator website traced this history in 2019.

Oscar Wilde (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessLiterature

I hate those who steal my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.

This line, often part of a longer version beginning “My solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people”, circulates widely under Nietzsche's name, but no one has found it in his books, notes or letters. Solitude was real in his life, though. Ill health ended his professorship at Basel in 1879, and for ten years he lived alone on his pension, spending summers in the Swiss Alps and winters in Genoa, Nice and Turin. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) he urges readers to flee into solitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) wrote this memoir with his colleague Aniela Jaffé; it appeared in 1962, a year after his death. The line comes from the chapter on his travels and is first about nations: Jung says he understood England only when he saw where he, as a Swiss, did not fit in, and Europe only by looking at it from outside, from the Sahara or New Mexico. It also echoes his idea of projection: we often see in others what we refuse to recognise in ourselves.

Carl Gustav JungRead card

StillnessLiterature

I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness. A real, thorough sickness.

Notes from Underground appeared in 1864 in Epoch, the journal Dostoevsky ran with his elder brother Mikhail. Its nameless narrator is a retired civil servant of forty living alone in a shabby corner of St Petersburg. This confession comes early, in chapter 2 of Part I: he has examined every motive so closely that he can no longer act on any. The book partly answered Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), which pictured a future built on reason and on people calculating their own interest.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Right or wrong, it is very pleasant to break something from time to time.

The line comes from chapter 9 of Part I, where the narrator attacks the idea that people always act in their own interest. Reformers of the 1860s dreamed of a perfectly rational society, which he mocks as a “palace of crystal”, after the glass hall built for London's Great Exhibition of 1851. People love building roads, he says, but they love destruction and chaos too; twice two makes four, yet twice two makes five can be charming. His point: people value the freedom to choose, even foolishly, above comfort.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, Part I, chapter 9Read card

StillnessLiterature

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth. Nothing is easier than flattery.

Svidrigailov says this in Part 6, chapter 4 of Crime and Punishment (1866). He is a rich, unscrupulous landowner in whose house Raskolnikov's sister Dunya once worked as a governess, and in a tavern he tells Raskolnikov how he tried to win her over, naming his weapon: flattery. If the truth carries even a hundredth part of a false note, he goes on, it jars; flattery can be false to the last note and still please. Dostoevsky gives this sharp insight to one of the novel's most sinister men.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Man only likes to count his troubles. He doesn't calculate his happiness.

The line comes from Part II, chapter 6 of Notes from Underground, which goes back to the narrator's twenties. After a humiliating dinner with old schoolfellows he meets Liza, a young woman working in a St Petersburg brothel, and tries to shake her with pictures of the life she is throwing away: people count their troubles, he tells her, but not their joys, though every life holds enough happiness. Yet part of him is performing and enjoying his power over her, so the advice is sincere and manipulative at once.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

Razumikhin, Raskolnikov's loyal friend, is a poor but cheerful former student. In Part 3, chapter 1, rather drunk, he walks Raskolnikov's mother and sister to their lodgings, making an excited speech against people who only repeat others' ideas. Talking nonsense, he says, is humanity's one privilege over all creation: through error you reach the truth, and nobody gets there without fourteen mistakes, likely a hundred and fourteen. Then comes this line, and then: “In the first case you are a man, in the second you're no better than a bird.”

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Dostoevsky published this short story in 1848, a year before his arrest and four years of hard labour in Siberia. It unfolds over four nights of the St Petersburg summer, when the sun barely sets. A lonely young man, a self-described dreamer, meets Nastenka crying at a canal railing. On the second night she asks for his story; he says he has none, and she laughs and asks how he has lived without one. He admits to a life spent alone, mostly in daydreams, and falls in love with her.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.

The words are Ivan Karamazov's, in the chapter “Rebellion” of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last novel, serialised in 1879–80. Ivan, the sceptical middle brother, meets his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk, in a tavern and sets out his case against the world as it is. People speak of “bestial” cruelty, he says, but that is unfair to beasts: a tiger only tears and gnaws. Citing true stories of cruelty to children, he refuses a harmony bought with their suffering. The next chapter is his prose poem “The Grand Inquisitor”.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

This is the third of five “Proverbs for Paranoids” scattered through Gravity's Rainbow (1973), by the famously private American novelist Thomas Pynchon. Set mostly in Europe at the end of the Second World War, it turns on Germany's V-2 rockets. Its hero, the American lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, comes to suspect that powerful organisations have been studying and steering him since infancy; the proverbs are rules for living with that suspicion. The Pulitzer jury chose the novel in 1974, but the prize board overruled them and gave no fiction prize.

Thomas PynchonRead card

StillnessLiterature

In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied.

Lincoln wrote this from Washington on 16 April 1848, twelve years before he was elected president. He was serving his only term in Congress, and his wife Mary had left the capital with their two small sons for her family's home in Kentucky. The letter explains the line: while she was there, he felt she kept him from his work; now that he has nothing but work, it has grown “exceedingly tasteless” to him. Often quoted as a remark on human restlessness, it is really a husband missing his family.

Abraham LincolnRead card

StillnessLiterature

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

Chaplin published My Autobiography in 1964, at 75. The line comes from his account of a later visit to London as a rich man, when each day at the luxurious Carlton Hotel felt like entering “a golden paradise”. He knew the other side well: born in 1889, he was sent at seven to the Lambeth workhouse, a home for the destitute, and his mother was committed to an asylum. By 1918, four years after his first film, the Tramp had made him one of the best-paid people in the world.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

Time is the great author. It always writes the perfect ending.

Chaplin wrote, directed and scored Limelight and plays Calvero, a once-famous clown of the music hall, Britain's variety theatre, whom London audiences have forgotten by 1914. He nurses a young dancer, Terry (Claire Bloom), back to health and to the stage, then steps aside so that she can be happy with a young composer, Neville. He says this line when he hears that the two have grown close. In the final number Buster Keaton joins him, the only time the two great silent comedians performed together on film.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

One murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.

In Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in, a sacked bank clerk marries rich widows and kills them for their money. Near the end, awaiting the guillotine, Verdoux says this to a journalist, calling war just another business. The line echoes Death (1759), a prize-winning poem by Beilby Porteus, later Bishop of London: one murder made a villain, millions a hero. Released amid claims that Chaplin was a communist, the film failed in the United States, but its screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

Men who think deeply say little in ordinary conversations.

The official Charlie Chaplin website gives Chaplin's own manuscript notes as the source of this line, without a date. It suits a man who became world-famous without saying a word on screen. Chaplin (1889–1977) grew up poor in London and won audiences everywhere as the Tramp, the little vagabond with a bowler hat, cane and baggy trousers. Even after sound arrived, he made City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) without dialogue. The Tramp's voice is heard only once, in Modern Times, singing a song in made-up words.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

I have yet to know a poor man who has nostalgia for poverty.

In A Writer's Notebook (1949), the novelist W. Somerset Maugham suggested that the rich and famous Chaplin secretly longed for the slums of his London childhood; walking with him through the poorest part of Los Angeles, Maugham saw his face light up. Chaplin answered with this line in My Autobiography (1964): poverty, he wrote, had no charm and had taught him only a warped sense of values. He knew it first hand. At seven he was sent to the Lambeth workhouse, where destitute people were housed in return for work.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

This is a ruthless world, and one must be ruthless to cope with it.

Henri Verdoux, the title character of Charlie Chaplin's dark comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947), is a sacked bank clerk who now marries rich widows and kills them for their money. One rainy night he takes in a young woman just out of prison, meaning to poison her, then spares her. As she leaves, he sums up his outlook with this line. She disagrees: the world is clumsy and sad, but kindness can make it lovely. Years later they meet again; she has grown rich and he has lost his family.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) was a French doctor who spent four years as an army surgeon in the First World War and won the Prix Goncourt, France's best-known literary prize, in 1918. He wrote La Possession du monde (The Heart's Domain) during the war. Shortly before this line he recalls that the war let him see his child only seven times, each time barely recognising him; now he keeps seven images of him. Our feelings, he adds, take their true colour only later, like prints in a photographer's gold bath.

Georges Duhamel, The Heart's Domain (1919)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Do not trust your memory. It is a net full of holes. The most beautiful prizes slip through it.

From La Possession du monde (The Heart's Domain, 1919), which the French writer Georges Duhamel wrote while serving as an army surgeon in the First World War. In a chapter on sharing one's discoveries with others, he recalls a friend who said almost every day that he had had a beautiful thought that morning and lost it. So keep a small notebook, Duhamel advises: the soul is a rushing river carrying mud, grass, flowers and gold, and the nuggets must be set aside before the current takes them.

Georges DuhamelRead card