14 quotes found
“Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?”
“This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.”
“...this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.”
“As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.”
“People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.”
“In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”
“Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears...”
“Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you...”
“Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French an...”
“Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his dif...”
“What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. ...”
“I am consoled only to see that I was not mistaken: Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once la...”
“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night o...”
“How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downt...”
