The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.
—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955
Archive
Quotes
Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175Those who cross the seas change their climate but not their character.
—Roman proverbThe sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.
—Ira Berkow, 1987Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871Water its living strength first shows, / When obstacles its course oppose.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815Better a thousand enemies outside the house than one inside.
—Arabic proverbThere is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.
—Annie Proulx, 2008A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851Keep running after a dog, and he will never bite you.
—François Rabelais, 1535There is a demon who puts wings on certain tales and launches them like eagles out into space.
—Alexandre Dumas, 1846The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
—Hannah Arendt, 1970Thought depends absolutely on the stomach, but in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.
—Voltaire, 1770