I hate the sight of monkeys; they remind me so of poor relations.
—Henry Luttrell, 1820
Archive
Quotes
In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
—Amiri Baraka, 1962Happiness (as the mathematicians might say) lies on a curve, and we approach it only by asymptote.
—Christopher Morley, 1919To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx, 1847Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
—Noël Coward, 1930The world began without man, and it will end without him.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955Doing research on the web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
—Roger Ebert, 1998I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.
—Margaret Atwood, 1976Happiness is not something you can catch and lock up in a vault like wealth. Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1939