Travels with my Aunt pg 50

" A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one."

-Travels with my Aunt, Graham Greene, pg 50

The Clown, pg 184

"They failed to grasp that the secret of the terror lay in the little things. To regret big things is child's play: political errors, adultery, murder, anti-Semitism--but who forgives, who understands the little things?

-Heinrich Boll, The Clown, pg 184

The Clown, pg 107

"There's nothing more depressing for people than a clown they feel sorry for. It's like a waiter coming up in a wheelchair to bring you your beer."

-Heinrich Boll, The Clown, pg 107

The Clown, pg 105

"An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass. The easiest people to exploit are artists and women, and every manager is from one to ninety-nine per cent a pimp."

-Heinrich Boll, The Clown, pg 105

The Salmon of Doubt, pg 45

" Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent thirty-five-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner."

--Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, pg 45

The Clown, pg 47

"Even the devil's eyes can't be as sharp as the neighbors'."

--Heinrich Boll, The Clown, pg 47

The Clown, pg 29

"For the outsider--and everyone in this world is an outsider in relation to everyone else--something always seems worse or better than it does for the one directly concerned, whether that something is good luck or bad luck, an unhappy love affair or an 'artistic decline'."

--Heinrich Boll, The Clown, pg 29

The Commitments, pg 9

"-The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.
They nearly gasped: it was so true."

--Roddy Doyle, The Commitments, pg 9

"The Muse's Tragedy"

"Then there set in a kind of Arctic winter. I crawled into myself as into a snow hut."

--Edith Wharton, "The Muse's Tragedy"

"The Muse's Tragedy"

"You can't imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man's not telling her that he loves her--pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other women used them!"

--Edith Wharton, "The Muse's Tragedy"

American Pastoral, pg 63

"Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on."

--Philip Roth, American Pastoral, pg 63

American Pastoral, pg 35

"The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that--well, lucky you."

Philip Roth, American Pastoral, pg 35

The American, pg 18

"He slaps a bottle as if it were a whore's buttocks. 'She is good.'

--The American, Martin Booth, pg 18

"Hangover Cures"

"Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression "it turns out" to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is."

--Douglas Adams, "Hangover Cures"

Animal Farm, pg 133

" All animals are equal
but some animals are more equal than others"

--George Orwell, Animal Farm, pg 133

Twelfth Night, II.III. 111-112

"Dost thou think, because thou are virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"

-Twelfth Night, II.III, 111-112

Twelfth Night, II. III. 47-52

"What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come and kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure."

--Twelfth Night, II. III,.47-52, William Shakespeare

No Place For You, My love

"Whatever people like to think, situations (if not scenes) were usually three-way--there was somebody else always. The one who didn't--couldn't--understand the two made the formidable third."

No Place for You, My Love, Eudora Welty

No Place For You, My love

"Like people in love, they had a supertition about themselves almost as soon as they came out on the floor, and dared not think the words 'happy' or 'unhappy', which might strike them, one or the other, like lightning."

-No place for you, my love. Eudora Welty

The Orchard Keeper, pg 246

"They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust. "

--Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, pg 246
The final paragraph of the novel.

Othello, III.III. 261-263

"Though her jesses were my dear heart-strings, I'ld whistle her off, and let her down the wind, To prey at fortune."

--William Shakespeare, Othello, act 3, scene 3, line 261-263

No Country for Old Men, pg 295

"It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong."

--Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, pg 295

Moby Dick, pg 151

"Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding."

--Herman Melville, Moby Dick, pg 151

Ray Bradbury

"I’m going to have a T-shirt made. It says: Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down."

--Ray Bradbury, A conversation with Ray Bradbury

No Country for Old Men

"It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."

-Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

The Little Prince, pg 91

"Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who love the little prince, as for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere--we do no know where--a sheep we have never met has or has not eaten a rose.
Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: has the sheep eaten the flower or not? And you will see how everything changes...
And no grown-up will ever understand the significance of this!"

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, pg 91

The Little Prince, pg 13

""Straight ahead does not take anyone very far...'"

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little , pg 13

Moby Dick, pg 56

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 12, pg 56

Moby Dick, p44

"But perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester.'"

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 10, pg 44.

Moby Dick, pg 30

"And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 5, pg 30.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."

Pablo Neruda, Tonight I can write the saddest lines

The Railroad

If our future journeys are to be little different from flashes of light, with no interim landscape and no interim thought, I think we will have lost the whole good of journeying and will have succumbed to a mere preoccupation with getting there.

E.B White, The Railroad

The Quiet American, pg 18

'"How did you know he was dead?"
It was a foolish police man's question, unworthy of the man who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so strangely loved his wife. You cannot love without intuition.'

Graham Greene, The Quiet American, pg 18

Ayckbourn on comedy

I’ve found that the darker the
drama the more you need to
search for the comedy. If you
don’t let the audience off the
hook occasionally to laugh when
you want them to, you’ll find
them roaring with laughter during
moments you didn’t intend.
One of the endearing features of
the human race is that we can’t
generally keep serious for long.
Be thankful for it. If we could
we’d probably have become
extinct long ago.

AYCKBOURN ON COMEDY

The Lover, pg 19

You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it.

Marguerite Duras, The Lover, p19

The Comedians, pg 21

" 'Vegetarianism isn't only a question of diet, Mr Brown. It touches life at many points. It we really eliminated acidity from the human body we would eliminate passion.'

'Then the world would stop.'

He reproved me gently, "I didnt' say love,' and I felt a curious sense of shame. Cynicism is cheap--you can buy it at any Monoprx store--it's built into all poor-quality goods."

Graham Greene,The Comedians, pg 21

The Tempest, IV. I.150-157

"And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

--Shakespeare, The tempest, IV.I. 150-157