The Quotes Project

[the-quotes-project]

"Do you desire esotric knowledge of hidden truths for which Dr Faustus sold his soul? Today such secrets are available to anyne with the internet and a few dollars to spare. Lost continents, ancient astronauts, the occult power of pyramids, fortune tellers, and character readers abound, and astrology columns appear in almost every major newspaper. [...] So if you think table-turning, rapping spiritualism is out of date ,think again. We are nnot so rational that we can escape hope and fear any better than our ancestors could. [...] The occult is alive and well and living next door."

–Thomas Hardy Leahy & Grace Evans, Psychology's Occult Doubles: Psychology and the Problem of Pseudoscience, xi-xii

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"For let us admit it: landscape is something foreign for us, and we are afraid when alone among the trees which are flowering, and streams which rush by. Even when alone with a dead human do we not feel so exposed as we do when we are alone among the trees. Because, mysterious as death is, still more mysterious is life that is not ours; life which does not participate in ours, and, without noticing us, celebrates its own feasts, while we look on with a certain embarassment, like guests arriving by accident who speak another language."

–Rainer Maria Rilke, 1902

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"And there, in spite of herself, came Jem's face again, with the growth of beard like a tramp, and his dirty shirt, and his bold, offensive stare. He lacked tenderness; he was rude, and he had more than a streak of cruelty about him; he was a theif and a liar. He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him. Nature cared nothing for prejudice. Men and women were like the animals on the farm at Helford, she supposed; there was a common law of attraction for all living things, some similarity of skin or touch, and they would go to one another. This was no choice made by the mind. Animals did not reason, neither did the birds in the air. Mary was no hypocrite; she was bred to the soil, and she had lived too long with the birds and beasts, and watched them mate, and bear their young, and die. There was precious little romance in nature, and she would not look for it in her own life. [...] No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be. She knew she would have to see him again."

–Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn, 160-63

[the-quotes-project]

"God, I want to get to know him. If I could build an ideal and creative life with him, or someone like him, I would feel I had lived a testimony of constructive faith in a hell of a world. And our reality would be our heaven. Please: I dream of talking to him again, under apple trees at night in the hilld of orchards; talking; quoting poetry; and making a good life. Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen."

–Sylvia Plath, Journals, 156

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"A celebration was called for, but an ephemeral one, like those in dreams in which glass palaces are always on the verge of shattering."

–Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery, 127

[the-quotes-project]

"I had lost all perspective; I was wandering in a desperate purgatory with a gray man in a gray boat in a gray river: an apathetic Charon dawdling upon a passionless, phlegmatic Rier Styx...And a petulant Christ child bawling on the train... The orange sun was a flat pasted disc on a smoky, aerid sky. Hell was Grand Central Station on a Sunday morning. And I was doomed to burn in ice, numb, cold, revolving in crystal, neutral, passive vaccums, void of sensation."

–Sylvia Plath, Journals, 153

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"In the meantime, the candle had burned itself out, leaving the gloomy room to the early light of dawn. The day, dreaded by Anna, in which the world would go on without Teodoro Massia, was already by now infesting the streets and infiltrating homes like a deadly plague."

–Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery, 112

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"I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough."

–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, 4

[the-quotes-project]

"You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart's little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scufed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming then row, row for your life toward it."

—Mary Oliver, West Wing #2

[the-quotes-project]

"Love-making is never simply pleasure. Sex manuals or feminist tracts which imply the infinite plasticity of position and pleasure, which counsel assertiveness, whether in bed or out, are dangerously destructive of imagination, of erotic and of spiritual ingenuity. The sexual exchange will be as complicated as the relationship in general, even more so. Kiss, caress and penetration are the relation of the relation, body and soul in touch, two times two adds up: three times three is the equation. The three I harbour within me—body, soul and paraclete—press against the same triplicity in you. What I want, my overcharged imagination, released inside your body, taken up into mine, with attack and with abandon, succumbs so readily and with more joy than I could claim, to your pasion, pudency and climax."

—Gillian Rose, Love's Work

[the-quotes-project]

"Diana and I spent that first morning walking aimlessly. The twisting lanes meandered with their own secret purpose, governed less by a town planner's master plan than a spontaneous temperament. Or so Siena led you to believe, until you suddenly reach its crescendo, which lay at the kernel of itself, a square like no other: the Piazza del Campo, simply referred to by the Sienese as 'Il Campo'. This is where Siena reaches the middle of itself, where it pours out completely. But here also is its source. This is the end and the beginning, the location of the twin tides, declared in the open. And it was as though Diana and I had entered a space that was ours, one in which we had all along been anticipated and where, we suspected, once we left we would continue to be expected. Isn't this at least one definition of happiness, I thought, to be anticipated? But, of course, it was not ours alone. Here we had to keep our manners and perhaps even our wits about us. No matter where we were in the square, we were able to see the entire place. Not one person was hidden. This strange effect was made possible by Il Campo's unusual tanning shape and by the way the ground dips dramatically towards the long side where the civic and secular heart of the city, the Palazzo Pubblico, raises its tower high to compensate for the hill and achieve its ultimate goal, which is to be the tallest building in the city, taller than any church. It was as if I had become, by simply walking into the Square, an all-seeing eye. But, because I could see every person in the square, this meant that each of them could potentially see me too. It was a space of mutual exposure. Whatever it is that creates that elusIve bond between strangers taking account of one another in a public space was present here but in such a criss-crossing of currents that the whole place seemed electrified. And so, although we had entered a recess, a sort of giant pit, Il Campo also appeared, like a lit-up stage, to be suspended. To cross it is to take part in a centuries-old choreography, one meant to remind all solitary beings that it was neither good nor possible to exist entirely alone."

—Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena

[the-quotes-project]

"My parents had five children. We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don't write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times. All it takes is for one, of us to say 'We haven't come to Bergamo on a military campaign', or 'Sulphuric acid stinks of fart', and we immediately fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognise each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they're like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hierogiyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the basis of our family unity and will persist as long as we are in the world, re-created and revived in disparate places on the earth whenever one of us says, "Most eminent Signor Lipmann', and we immediately hear my father's impatient voice ringing in our ears: 'Enough of that story! I've heard it far too many times already!'"

—Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon

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"What, finally, is pseudoscience? James Webb described the occult underground as a huge realm of beliefs rejected by orthodox society. Pseudoscience is a part of that underground—the part that follows the procedures of science and is captive to scientism. It is propelled by the unmet, deeply rooted human need for a universe of meaning, rather than one of mere order. Pseudosciences attempt to find meaning in many places—patterns in the sky, bumps on the skull, the speech of somnambules and mediums, patterns of card guesses. In each case, the phenomena are looked into scientifically, but in each case the motivation is to find something science cannot give—answers to the ultimate questions about the meaning, dignity, and endlessness of life. Obsessively pursued, these questions must lead away from science to the making of a pseudoscience. There is nothing unscientific about phrenology, mesmerism, or parapsychology—which conclusion does not make them sciences. They are not sciences because they try to delve deeper than any science can. To say that they are not sciences is not to condemn them, except to the believer in scientism. If Veatch is correct, the searcher after Truth ought not go to science in the first place. Instead, the searcher should go to philosophy, art, literature, and religion. Not every human question has a scientific answer. Science can prolong life; it cannot tell us when life ought to be prolonged. Science can diagnose birth defects and abort babies; it cannot tell us which, if any, babies should be aborted. Science can build a laser: it cannot tell us where to aim it. We cannot look to science for meaning and moral values. But we ought not infer from that that life has no meaning, that there are no oral values. Questions of meaning and morality must be asked; science .ay help us rule out certain answers. Ultimately, however, we must look elsewhere for Truth."

—Thomas Hardy Leahy & Grace Evans, Psychology's Occult Doubles: Psychology and the Problem of Pseudoscience

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"Who is entitled to write his reminiscences? Everyone. Because no one is obliged to read them. In order to write one's reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman—it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely the desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so. Every ife is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another's heart, and to listen to its beating .. . he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification..."

—Gillian Rose, Love's Work

[the-quotes-project]

"Whenever we make that drive, I always make it a point to take Massachusetts Avenue, in spite of the traffic. I barely recognize the buildings now, but each time I am there I return instantly to those six weeks as if they were only the other day, and I slow down and point to Mrs. Croft's street, saying to my son, here was my first home in America, where I lived with a woman who was 103. “Remember?" Mala says, and smiles, amazed, as I am, that there was ever a time that we were strangers. My son always expresses his astonishment, not at Mrs. Croft's age, but at how little I paid in rent, a fact nearly as inconceivable to him as a flag on the moon was to a woman born in 1866. In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."

—Jhumpa Lahiri, The Third and Final Continent (from Interpreter of Maladies)

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Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless– A lump of death–a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd They slept on the abyss without a surge– The waves were dead ; the tides were in their grave, The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before; The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need Of aid from them–She was the Universe.

—Lord Byron, Darkness

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"You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool."

—Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or