The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger, 1984
Archive
Quotes
O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!
—William Shakespeare, c. 1596The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.
—Max Born, 1968O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.
—Horace, c. 8 BCGreat cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.
—Matthew Hale Smith, 1868I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940What will not attract a man’s stare at sea?—a gull, a turtle, a flying fish!
—Richard Burton, 1883I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
—Carl Sandburg, 1936A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969Years are nothing to me—they should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them or to consider them? In the world of wild nature, time is measured by seasons only—the bird does not know how old it is—the rose tree does not count its birthdays!
—Marie Corelli, 1911