“I know, you will leave me with nothing–neither the laurel nor the rose. Take it all then! There is one possession I take with me from this place. Tonight when I stand before God–and bow low to him, so that my forehead brushes his footstool, the firmament–I will stand again and proudly show Him that one pure possession–which I have never ceased to cherish or to share with all–“
– Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 5
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Quote, On the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
“Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America — burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again.”
— Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
“We are largely…
“We are largely a collection of marionettes on strings. And those strings are being pulled from the late 16th century.”
-Morris Berman, author of Twilight of American Culture, source (x)
Quote, On Commodities
“In other words, it’s not the ownership of a library which creates non-commoditized wealth but the joy, knowledge and pleasure derived from the reading of the books which defines wealth.”
Quote, Christmas Season
“He would never forget this particular twilight. Years later, looking back across all their voyages together, this walk along Penn Boulevard would become his fondest memory. He would wake from a deep sleep in the dead of night and remember Philadelphia, Christmas, and the snow. He would hear the far-off carols playing their evensong and taste the winter air they breathed and feel the frozen grief of the solitude that divided them. That was the year I gave her a pear, he would tell the darkness.”
-Marc Behm, The Eye of the Beholder
Writing, As Seduction
“To compensate for the difficulties in their lives, people spend a lot of their time daydreaming, imagining a future full of adventure, success, and romance. If you can create the illusion that through you they can live out their dreams, you will have them at your mercy. Aim at secret wishes that have been thwarted or repressed, stirring up uncontrollable emotions, clouding their powers of reason. Lead the seduced to a point of confusion in which they can no longer tell the difference between illusion and reality.”
The Art of Seduction, Robert Greene
Writing Is Power
” . . . nothing has changed about why writers who don’t do it for the money write. It’s art, and art is meaning, and meaning is power. The best voices of a generation surely know this already.”
-David Foster Wallace, “Both Flesh and Not”
The Waitresses Are Laughing
” . . . years later I heard it phrased perfectly by Bill Cosby. He said that early in his career, when the audience wasn’t laughing, he could hear the waitresses laughing, and they saw the show night after night.
“I noticed the waitresses were laughing.”
-Steve Martin, “Born Standing Up”
On Individuality
“So I decided I’d rather starve and live on the edges of nowhere than do anything at all, then become anything labeled. So for fifty years, I was a scarecrow unlabeled and now, I’m supposed to be a writer.”
-Charles Bukowski, source x
“Moral reform i…
“Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Martin Rose 