The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
—Italo Calvino, 1967
Archive
Quotes
Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1843The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
—James Joyce, 1922No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.
—Blaise Pascal, 1658Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
—William Morris, 1882Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
—Virginia Woolf, 1899Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
—Arnold Toynbee, 1948Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.
—William Hazlitt, 1821Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCPeople revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005The atavistic urge toward danger persists and its satisfaction is called adventure.
—John Steinbeck, 1941