57 quotes found
Writer · American · 1928
American writer (born 1928)
“Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work not yours.”
“Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.”
“The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren'...”
“It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under ...”
“The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.”
“When something does not insist on being noticed when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event we take for granted the very things that most deserve our grati...”
“What we remember from childhood we remember forever-permanent ghosts stamped imprinted eternally seen.”
“After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies.”
“Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.”
“He who cries, What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me, does not know even that.”
“It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.”
“Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart.”
“Like twinned with unlike is beauty's shock. And beauty...is eternal.”
“She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.”
“What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done. (Forward)”
“Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment. (The Biological P...”
“We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution. (Justice to Feminism)”
“We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are. (Justice to Feminism)”
“I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing...I read in order to find out what I need to know: To illuminate the riddle.”
“One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language.”
