David Patrick John

[davidpatrickjohn]

Why in the world couldn't you get a man to go away with you and be just — oh, light comedy - for a whole, a whole blessed weekend.

For a whole blessed life... Why not? ... Think of it.... A whole blessed life with a man who was a good sort and yet didn't go all gurgly in the voice, and cod fish-eyed and all overish — to the extent of not being able to find the tickets when asked for them.

Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades, p395

[davidpatrickjohn]

She was by that time tired of men, or she imagined that she was; for she was not prepared to be certain, considering the muckers she saw women coming all round her over the most unpresentable individuals. Men, at any rate, never fulfilled expectations. They might, upon acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with any man before you said: "But I've read all this before. ..." You knew the opening, you were already bored by the middle, and, especially, you knew the end.

Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades, p394

[davidpatrickjohn]

Tomorrow? When and what was that? Who ever has believed in the reality of death in the presence of vibrant life?

It is a parable sometimes told by the old. Some man in a far country, whom you never knew, went off somewhere one time, and being a fool, laid down and died. But who, in love, ever paid any attention to a made-up tale like that?

Hurston Seraph on the Swanee p 219

[davidpatrickjohn]

That hour of the life of a man when first the help of humanity fails him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence humanity holds him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard one, but not the hardest. There is still another hour which follows, when he learns that in his infinite comparative minuteness and abjectness, the gods do likewise despise him, and own him not of their clan. Divinity and humanity then are equally willing that he should starve in the street for all that either will do for him. Now cruel father and mother have both let go his hand, and the little soul-toddler, now you shall hear his shriek and his wail, and often his fall.

Melville Pierre, or the Ambiguities 1851, P296

[davidpatrickjohn]

But here I may err, because of my own consciousness I can not identify i myself-I mean in the memory of my whole foregoing life, I say, I can not identify that thing which is called happiness; that thing whose token is a laugh, or a smile, or a silent serenity on the lip. I may have been happy, but it is not in my conscious memory now. Nor do I feel a longing for it, as though I had never had it; my spirit seeks different food from happiness; for l think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but nor because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness Melville Pierre, or the Ambiguities 1851, P119

[davidpatrickjohn]

I pray for peace for motionlessness for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness. Therefore I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things. I feel I am an exile here. I still go straying.—Yes; in thy speech, thou smilest.-But let me be silent again. Do not answer me. When I resume, I will not wander so, but make short end."

Melville Pierre, or the Ambiguities 1851, P119

[davidpatrickjohn]

Heaven, after all, hath been a little merciful to the miserable man; not entirely untempered to human nature are the most direful blasts of Fate.

When on all sides assailed by prospects of disaster, whose final ends are in terror hidden from it, the soul of man-either, as instinctively convinced that it can not battle with the whole host at once; or else, benevolently blinded to the larger arc of the circle which menacingly hems it in;— whichever be the truth, the soul of man, thus surrounded, can not, and does never intelligently confront the totality of its wretchedness. The bitter drug is divided into separate draughts for him: to-day he takes one part of his woe; to-morrow he takes more; and so on, till the last drop is drunk.

Melville Pierre, or the Ambiguities 1851, P104

[davidpatrickjohn]

Where narrow minds imagine they have received injury, they seek revenge rather than redress, from an opinion that such a conduct asserts their own importance.

Fanny Burney, Camilla, 1796, P 717

[davidpatrickjohn]

" You don't mean that charity is played out ? " asked the doctor.

" In the old-fashioned way, yes."

" But they say poverty is on the increase. What is to be done ? "

"Justice," said Annie. "Those who do most of the work in the world ought to share in its comforts as a right, and not be put off with what we idlers have a mind to give them from our superfluity as a grace."

" Yes, that 's all very true. But what till justice is done ?"

" Oh, we must continue to do charity," cried Annie, with self-contempt that amused him. " But don't you see how much more complicated it is? That 's what I meant by life not being simple any more. It was easy enough to do charity when it used to seem the right and proper remedy for suffering; but now, when I can't make it appear a finality, but only something provisional, temporary Don't you see ? "

" Yes, I see. But I don't see how you 're going to help it. At the same time, I'll allow that it makes life more difficult."

William Dean Howells Annie Kilburn, 1885

[davidpatrickjohn]

“I guess the Old Country was all right in its day, but now we got the world by the tail; we got the bulge on Europe not only in banking and university work and the soft-drink business, but in architecture and even in music and story-writing and all that guff. A European guy that wants to make good in any highclass artistic racket today has got to come to America—hat in hand. But then, you and I are alike. We don’t fall for the arty pose. We know that it’s just another way of making a living and cashing in big—like the chain-grocery game. No, no. Come to your senses and have a nice sensible rest, playing golf in Florida for maybe couple weeks, and get back to work. Then you'll thank me for having steered you away from your schoolboy notions about going off half-cocked to the Old Country. Yessir-ee! You'll thank me big!”

Sinclair Lewis, World So Wide, 1951

[davidpatrickjohn]

'Far be it from me,' said Lord Orville, 'to dispute the magnetic power of beauty, which irresistibly draws and attracts whatever has soul and sympathy: and I am happy to acknowledge, that though we have now no gods to occupy a mansion professedly built for them, yet we have secured their better halves, for we have goddesses to whom we all most willingly bow down.'"

Fanny Burney, Evelina, 1778

[davidpatrickjohn]

"He was a poor, cheap sort of a creature. Deplorably smart, and regrettably handsome. A fellow that assimilated everything to a certain extent, and nothing thoroughly. A fellow with no more moral nature than a base-ball. The sort of chap you'd expect to find, the next time you met him, in Congress or the house of correction." Howells A Modern Instance, 1881

[davidpatrickjohn]

Howells, Annie Kilburn, 1889, Page 239

" There is an evolution," he continued, " in the moral as well as in the material world, and good unfolds in greater good; that which was once best ceases to be in that which is better. In the political world we have striven forward to liberty as to the final good, but with this achieved we find that liberty is only a means and not an end, and that we shall abuse it as a means if we do not use it, even sacrifice it, to promote equality; or in other words, equality is the perfect work, the evolution of liberty. Patriotism has been the virtue which has secured an image of brotherhood, rude and imperfect, to large numbers of men within certain limits, but nationality must perish before the universal ideal of fraternity is realised. Charity is the holiest of the agencies which have hitherto wrought to redeem the race from savagery and despair; but there is something holier yet than charity, something higher, something purer and further from selfishness, something into which charity shall willingly grow and cease, and that is justice. Not the justice of our Christless codes, with their penalties, but the instinct of righteous shame which, however dumbly, however obscurely, stirs in every honest man's heart when his superfluity is confronted with another's destitution, and which is destined to increase in power till it becomes the social as well as the individual conscience. Then, in the truly Christian state, there shall be no more asking and no more giving, no more gratitude and no more merit, no more charity, but only and evermore justice; all shall share alike, and want and luxury and killing toil and heartless indolence shall all cease together. "It is in the spirit of this justice that I believe Christ shall come to judge the world; not to condemn and punish so much as to reconcile and to right. We live in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on either side the forces are embattled. The working-men are combined in vast organisations to withstand the strength of the capitalists, and these are taking the lesson and uniting in trusts. The smaller industries are gone, and the smaller commerce is being devoured by the larger. Where many little shops existed one huge factory assembles manufacture; one large store, in which many different branches of trade are united, swallows up the small dealers. Yet in the labour organisations, which have their bad side, their weak side, through which the forces of hell enter, I see evidence of the fact that the poor have at last had pity on the poor, and will no more betray and underbid and desert one another, but will stand and fall together as brothers ; and the monopolies, though they are founded upon ruin, though they know no pity and no relenting, have a final significance which we must not lose sight of. They prophesy the end of competition; they eliminate one element of strife, of rivalry, of warfare. But woe to them through whose evil this good comes, to any man who prospers on to ease and fortune, forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success is built. For that death the resurrection and the life seem not to be. Whatever his creed or his religious profession, his state is more pitiable than that of the sceptic, whose words perhaps deny Christ, but whose works affirm Him, There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it. If God is, nothing exists but from Him. He directs the very reason that questions Him, and Christ rises anew in the doubt of him that the sins of Christendom inspire.

Howells, Annie Kilburn, 1889, Page 239

[davidpatrickjohn]

" If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it is, what a responsihihty, to do the least thing for others! And once it seemed so simple ! And it seems all the more difficult, the more means you have for doing good. The poor people seem to help one another without doing any harm…"

"Yes," said the minister, "it is difficult to help others when we cease to need help ourselves. A man begins poor, or his father or grandfather before him — it doesn't matter how far back he begins — and then he is in accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron, an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his help is not an impulse of the love that ought to bind us all together, but a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong." 

Howells, Annie Kilburn, 1889, Page 169

[davidpatrickjohn]

" You know how I like to go on about other people's sins, and the world's wickedness generally; but one day Brother Peck, in that cool, impersonal way of his, suggested that it was not a wholly meritorious thing to hate evil. He went so far as to say that perhaps we could not love them that despitefully used us if we hated their evil so furiously. He said it was a good deal more desirable to understand evil than to hate it, for then we could begin to cure it. Yes, Brother Peck let in a good deal of light on me. He rather insinuated that I must be possessed by the very evils I hated, and that was the reason I was so violent about them. I had always supposed that I hated other people's cruelty because I was merciful, and their meanness because I was magnanimous, and their intolerance because I was generous, and their conceit because I was modest, and their selfishness because I was disinterested ; but after listening to Brother Peck a while I came to the conclusion that I hated these things in others because I was cruel myself, and mean, and bigoted, and conceited, and piggish; and that's why I've hated Brother Peck ever since — just like you, Annie. But he didn't reform me, I'm thankful to say, any more than he did you. I've gone on just the same, and I suppose I hate more infernal scoundrels and loathe more infernal idiots to-day than ever; but I perceive that I'm no part of the power that makes for righteousness as long as I work that racket; and now I sin with light and knowledge, anyway.

William Dean Howells, Annie Kilburn, 1889, Page 131

[davidpatrickjohn]

It seemed to Clara that every additional year spent at the University but served to emphasize its inadequacy. It was so also with the books she read and the thoughts and actions of the older people about her. Her aunt and uncle did not talk much, but seemed to take it for granted she wanted to live such another life as they were living. She thought with horror of the probability of marrying a maker of plows or of some other dull necessity of life and then spending her days in the making of stockings for babies that did not come, or in some other equally futile manifestation of her dissatisfaction. She realized with a shudder that men like her uncle, who spent their lives in adding up rows of figures or doing over and over some tremendously trivial thing, had no conception of any outlook for their women beyond living in a house, serving them physically, wearing perhaps good enough clothes to help them make a show of prosperity and success, and drifting finally into a stupid acceptance of dullness — an acceptance that both she and the passionate, twisted man beside her were fighting against.

Sherwood Anderson, Poor White, 1920

[davidpatrickjohn]

‘‘ Well, there’s going to be a new war here,” he said. ‘‘ It won’t be like the Civil War, just shooting off guns and killing peoples’ bodies. At first it’s going to be a war between individuals to see to what class a man must belong; then it is going to be a long, silent war between classes, between those who have and ' those who can’t get. It'll be the worst war of all.”

Sherwood Anderson, Poor White, 1920