Archives - December 2000

What was given to us by the past is adapted to the possibilities of the future.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are somone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

If the fine arts and the humanities really didn't matter, then most of what we call civilization has been a mistake.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

I need to love my enemies; I made them.

The New England conscience…does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't— it just stops you from enjoying it.

A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.

Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.

If you travel faster than the speed of light, will you still be left in the dark?

My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

I am not so much concerned with the right of everyone to say anything he pleases as I am about our need as self-governing people to hear everything.

A perfectly managed Christmas correct in every detail is, like basted inside seams and letters answered by return, a sure sign of someone who hasn't enough to do.

No law can be sacred to me buy that of my nature.

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

Motherhood is like Albania--you can't trust the description in the books, you have to go there.

Number is an invention meant to atone for a bad memory.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.

The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?