Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
—Jean Genet, 1986
Archive
Quotes
It was lonesome, the leaving.
—Wetatonmi, c. 1877Communities do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1863I prefer liberty with unquiet to slavery with quiet.
—Sallust, c. 35 BCAs far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
—Will Self, 1994According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1794Ah, there are no children nowadays.
—Molière, 1673“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
—Gertrude Stein, 1914How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”
—Persius, c. 60At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
—Rose Macaulay, 1925Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.
—Philip Sidney, 1582