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- Glen Baxter's drawing for the cover of QUOTE UNQUOTE
- GLEAMING GLEANINGS
- Some Recent Catches
"John Chever told me long ago that it was his readers who kept him going, people from every part of the country who had written to him. When he was at work, he was aware of these readers and correspondents in the woods beyond the lawn. 'If I couldn't picture them, I'd be sunk,' he said. And the novelist Wright Morris, urging me to get an electric typewriter, said that he seldom turned his machine off. 'When I'm not writing, I listen to the electricity,' he said. 'It keeps me company. We have conversations.'
-- Saul Bellow
"There are as many idiots in France as any place else. But I like the spirit of the people-- there's a little wickedness. I love the light. I love the landscape. I love the odors in the air."
-- Richard Olney, near Toulon, Provence, France
"I don't like recipes. They keep cooks from using their intuition, and intuition is precisely what so much of cooking is about."
-- Richard Olney
"To shock for shock's sake does not good art make-- Kiki Smith's 'Tale,' a sculpture showing a crouching figure defecating in 'The American Century, Part II' exhibition now at the Whitney, will never hold a place in the pantheon of great art alongside that of Lorenzo Lotto's 'Allegory of Marriage,' now in the Met's collection, depicting a naked putto urinating on a naked Venus. One is simply disgusting and devoid of any craft or aesthetic merit; the other is of superior aesthetic quality."
-- Philippe de Montebello, in The New York Times
"The world is as unstable as the pools and shallows of Asuka River. Times change and things disappear: joy and sorrow come and go; a place that once thrived turns into an uninhabited moor; a house may remain unaltered, but its occupants will have changed. The peach and the damson trees in the garden say nothing-- with whom is one to reminisce about the past?
-- Kenko, in The Tsurezuregusa
"Och, aye, the feckin' bloody English, they wouldn't give you the steam off their piss if you were dyin' o' thirst!"
-- Frank McCourt, in Angela's Ashes
"Everything has been said. But nobody listens. Therefore it has to be said all over again-- only better."
-- Roger Shattuck, in Candor and Perversion
"Andy tells me Bird was the greatest American who ever lived, right up there with Abraham Lincoln and Max Kiss, the guy who invented Ex-Lax."
-- Frank McCourt, in 'Tis
'I want to be the foist great composer that is Jewish."
-- Morton Feldman
"What have I really learned as a human being from my cats? In the first place, they do not do a lick of work. They may think they do, but they do not."
-- Willie Morris, in My Cat Spit McGee
"Bacchus amat colles." (Bacchus loves the hills.)
-- The Oxford Companion to Wine
"I'm tellin' you boys, and it's God's own truth, there are people in this town who wear clean shirts over dirty underwear."
-- Ozark saying,, collected by Max Hunter (1917-1999)
"You're spreading it faster than I can shovel it."
-- Max Hunter
"At issue is a belief that American society amounts to something like a civilization. Today's Norman Rockwell revival signals a weariness with the rancorous horror that democracy becomes for want of that spirit. Honoring such grace in the past, we ready ourselves to receive its like again."
-- Peter Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker
"A man must repair his friendships."
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson
"The only good woman was Betsy Ross, and all she ever made was a flag."
-- Mae West
"So is music an asylum. It takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Smallpox, brucellosis, anthrax, and tuberculosis are all cattle diseases, influenza comes from hogs, leprosy from the water buffalo, the common cold from horses, and measles, rabies, and hydatid cysts from dogs. All these diseases probably first affected human beings aftet these animals were first domesticated and when the density of human populations increased sufficiently to permit these microbes to propagate."
-- Helen Epstein, in "The Strange Origins of AIDS"
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil-- that takes religion."
-- Steven Weinberg
"Another of Lord Berners' successes was his method of emptying a compartment in a railway carriage. You read a newspaper upside down and take your temperature every few minutes. The other passengers will invariably move to another compartment."
-- Noel Annan, in The New York Review of Books
"Jas died on November 12, 1997. Gertrude called. Then someone from the office in New York called. Then people from all over the country called. I unplugged my phone. I hobbled out to the pasture and pissed in the snow."
-- Hayden Carruth (on the death of James Laughlin), in Beside the Shadblow Tree
"The will has been probated. Jas has left me $5,000. I figure this means he still owes me about $100,000. But then-- the poor are always the creditors of the rich. Isn't that so? Generally speaking, I deplore it. But in the present case I don't much mind."
-- Hayden Carruth
"Things don't happen, it depends on who comes along."
-- Paul Bowles
"If one had enough money to go to America, one would not go."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Write as if you wish to be understood by an unusually bright ten-year-old."
-- William Maxwell
"Whenever women are ill, it's their fault."
-- Pablo Picasso, in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, by John Richardson
"If you give up smoking, drinking, and sex, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer."
-- Clement Freud, M.P.
"The effect of tea is cooling and as a beverage it is most suitable. It is especially fitting for persons of self-restraint and inner worth."
-- Lu Yu (715-803), in the Ch'a Ching
"The flavor of Zen and the flavor of tea is the same."
-- Japanese proverb
"There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Tea is quiet and it takes a quiet palate to appreciate something that calls so little attention to itself... Teas are the subtlest tastes our tongues can detect, I realized, for tea does not even have a taste, but rather just an effect, like the wind."
-- James Norwood Pratt, in New Tea Lover's Treasury
"Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet."
-- Colette
"How can anyone be a Romanian writer? With heroes who eat five olives in three weeks and smoke one cigarette in two years, with a little market tavern in the mountains and a farm with three pigsties belonging to a teacher in Moldova, no novel or even literature can be made."
-- Camil Petrescu
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