A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851
Archive
Quotes
The land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.
—The BibleWe are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
—Marcel Proust, c. 1922Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
—Joan Didion, 2005Never make a defense or apology before you be accused.
—Charles I, 1636The great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last night’s moment to a day which has no knowledge of it.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
—Anaïs Nin, 1939I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.
—Diane Arbus, c. 1950The root of the kingdom is in the State. The root of the State is in the family. The root of the family is in the person of its Head.
—Mencius, c. 270 BCJourneys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.
—Lawrence Durrell, 1957Revolutions never go backward.
—Thomas Skidmore, 1829Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it—have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.
—James Russell Lowell, 1884Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends.
—W.B. Yeats, 1937