Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.
—Robert Wilson, 1991
Archive
Quotes
Friends are ourselves.
—John Donne, 1603Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCI think we are inexterminable, like flies and bedbugs.
—Robert Frost, 1959Never make a defense or apology before you be accused.
—Charles I, 1636The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.
—John Donne, c. 1629Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.
—Lucretius, c. 57 BCIt’s easy to be independent when you’ve got money. But to be independent when you haven’t got a thing—that’s the Lord’s test.
—Mahalia Jackson, 1966Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?
—Philip Johnson, 1965The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.
—Horace, c. 25 BC