Quotations from *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*, 5 of 22
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush!
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee!
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

A laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults -- not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations -- but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.

This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the Sperm Whale's food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of Sperm Whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earliest part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Quotations from *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*, 9 of 22
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Yet habit -- strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

When the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire interior of the Sperm Whale's enormous head consists. Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“He's dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.

“Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness.... Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How, at such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all things.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swallar wid, but to bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

They viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale's skin.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.... Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log -- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. that head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Quotations from *Platform*
Michel Houellebecq
1958- French
translated by Frank Wynne

It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.
—Michel Houellebecq, Platform

The things people do, the things they are prepared to endure...there was nothing to be made of all this, no overall conclusion, no meaning.
—Michel Houellebecq, Platform

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 3 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Razumov thought to himself that this man entrusted with so much arbitrary power must have believed what he said or else he could not have gone on bearing the responsibility.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

It seemed to him bizarre that secrecy should play such a large part in the comfort and safety of lives.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The trivialities of daily existence were an armour for the soul.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"I suppose," thought Razumov, "that if I had made up my mind to blow out my brains on the landing I would be going up these stairs as quietly as I am doing it now. What's a man to do?"
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Several times that night he woke up shivering from a dream of walking through drifts of snow in a Russia where he was as completely alone as any betrayed autocrat could be; an immense, wintry Russia which, somehow, his view could embrace in all its enormous expanse as if it were a map.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In its pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen, the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent....
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The light coming through the window seemed strangely cheerless, containing no promise as the light of each new day should for a young man.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He did nothing all that day; he neglected even to brush his hair. The idea of going out never occurred to him—and if he did not start a connected train of thought it was not because he was unable to think. It was because he was not interested enough.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

No doubt he was looking forward to the consummation of his martyrdom. A man who resigns himself to kill need not go very far for resignation to die.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He did not attempt to put his papers in order, either that evening or the next day—which he spent at home in a state of peculiar irresolution. This irresolution bore upon the question whether he should continue to live—neither more nor less. But its nature was very far removed from the hesitation of a man contemplating suicide.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Razumov envied the materialism of the thief and the passion of the incorrigible lover. The consequences of their actions were always clear and their lives remained their own.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 7 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark glasses, became to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but with a horrible, triumphant satisfaction. His imagination dwelt on that atrocity in spite of himself. It was as if he were becoming light-headed. "It is not what is expected of me," he repeated to himself. "It is not what is—I could get away by breaking the fastening on the little gate I see there in the back wall. It is a flimsy lock. Nobody in the house seems to know he is here with me. Oh yes. The hat! These women would discover presently the hat he has left on the landing. They would come upon him, lying dead in this damp, gloomy shade—but I would be gone and no one could ever...Lord! Am I going mad?" he asked himself in a fright.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Perfection itself would not produce that effect," pursued Peter Ivanovitch, "in a world not meant for it."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The record, which could not have been meant for anyone's eyes but his own, was not, I think, the outcome of that strange impulse of indiscretion common to men who lead secret lives, and accounting for the invariable existence of "compromising documents" in all the plots and conspiracies of history.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

An immense longing to make his way out of these grounds and to the other end of the town, of throwing himself on his bed and going to sleep for hours, swept everything clean out of his mind for a moment. "Is it possible that I am but a weak creature after all?" he asked himself, in sudden alarm.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The expression of her face was grave, intent; so grave that Razumov, after approaching her close, felt obliged to smile.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Fifteen years of a life like his make changes in a man. Lonely, like a crow in a strange country. When I think of Yakovlitch before he went to America—"
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"But we women are in love with love, and with hate, with these very things I tell you, and with desire itself. That's why we can't be bribed off so easily as you men."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: 'Man is a digestive tube.' I imagine now...."

"I spit on him."

"What? On Cabanis? All right. But you can't ignore the importance of a good digestion. The joy of life—you know the joy of life?—depends on a sound stomach, whereas a bad digestion inclines one to scepticism, breeds black fancies and thoughts of death."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 4 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

Henry had learned many things in dealing with the slaves. He knew that he must never let them see what he was thinking, for then, in some ineffable way, they had a hold on him which would be difficult to shake off. He must be cold and distant and insulting to those below him. With few exceptions, they would take insult as the sign of his superiority. Men always believed him what he seemed to be, and he could seem to be almost anything.

If one were brilliantly dressed, all men presumed him rich and powerful, and treated him accordingly. When he said things as though he meant them, nearly all acted as though he meant them. And, most important of his lessons—if he were perfectly honest and gave a strict accounting in nine consecutive dealings, then the tenth time he might steal as much as he wished, and no one would dream of suspecting him, so only he had brought the nine times forcibly enough to the attention of all men.

A growing pile of golden coins in a box under his bed gave ample proof of the validity of this last lesson. And he followed all his teachings. He never gave any man the least hold on him, nor insight into his motives and means and abilities and shortcomings. Since most men did not believe in themselves, they could not believe in one they understood to be like themselves.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

He gazed about him and knew that he should be satisfied, but his eyes had never lost the trick of looking out beyond distance and over the edge of the present. A little hectoring wish ran through his waking and dreaming like a thin red line. He must get back to the sea and ships. The sea was his mother and his mistress, and the goddess who might command and find him ready and alert for service.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“I loved her with that love a man may exercise but once.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“But—do you love Paulette?”

He leaped up and glared at her.

“You? Love you? Why, you are just a little animal! a pretty little golden animal, for sure, but a form of flesh—no more. May one worship a god merely because he is big, or cherish a land which has no virtue save its breadth, or love a woman whose whole realm is her flesh? Ah, Paulette! you have no soul at all! Elizabeth had a white winged soul. I love you—yes—with what you have to be loved—the body. But Elizabeth—I loved Elizabeth with my soul.”

Paulette was puzzled.

“What is this soul?” she asked. “And how may I get one if I have not one already? And where is this soul of yours that I have never seen it or heard it at all? And if they cannot be seen, or heard, or touched, how do you know she had this soul?”

“Hush!” he cried furiously. “Hush! or I box your mouth and have you whipped on the cross. You speak of things beyond you. What can you know of love that lies without your fleshly juggling?”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 5 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

There was respect in his eyes, surely, but no fear, no jealousy, and no suspicion.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“Heard of her!” he said softly. “Sir, I have dreamed of her and called to her in my sleep. Who has not? Who in all this quarter of the world has not heard of her, and yet who knows any single thing about her? It is a strange thing, the magic of this woman’s name. La Santa Rosa! La Santa Rosa! It conjures up desire in the heart of every man—not active, possible desire, but the ‘if I were handsome, if I were a prince’ kind of desire. The young men make wild plans; some to go disguised to Panama, others to blow it up with quantities of powder. They daydream of carrying the Red Saint off with them. Sir, I have heard a seaman all rotten with disease whispering to himself in the night, ‘If this thing were not on me, I would go adventuring for La Santa Rosa.’”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

And again they sat silently, drinking the rich wine.

“But there is much suffering bound up in women,” Henry Morgan began, as though he had just finished speaking. “They seem to carry pain about with them in a leaking package. You have loved often, they say, Coeur de Gris. Have you not felt the pain they carry?”

“No, sir, I do not think I have. Surely I have been assailed by regrets and little sorrows—everyone has; but mostly I have found only pleasure among women.”

“Ah, you are lucky,” the captain said. “You are filled with luck not to have known the pain. My own life was poisoned by love. This life I lead was forced on me by lost love.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“Here is an old man, sir. We are sure he has riches, but he has hidden them away and we can never find any.”

“Then put his feet in the fire!—why, he is a brazen fool! Break his arms!— He will not tell? Put the whip-cord about his temples!— Oh, kill him! kill him and stop his screaming— Perhaps he had no money—”

(There is a woman in Panama—)

“Have you scratched out every grain of gold? Place the city at ransom! We must have riches after pain.”

A fleet of Spanish ships came sailing to the rescue.

“A Spanish squadron coming? We will fight them! No, no; we shall run from them if we can get away. Our hulls lag in the water with their weight of gold. Kill the prisoners!”

(—she is lovely as the sun.)
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

Quotations from *Cup of Gold*, 9 of 11
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 American

“And I have heard your words so often and so often in Paris and Cordova. I am tired of these words that never change. Is there some book with which aspiring lovers instruct themselves? The Spanish men say the same things, but their gestures are more practiced, and so a little more convincing. You have much to learn.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“When I heard of you and your blustering up and down the ocean, I thought of you, somehow, as the one realist on an earth of vacillation. I dreamed that you would come to me one day, armed with a transcendent, silent lust, and force my body with brutality. I craved a wordless, reasonless brutality....

“I wanted blind force—blind, unreasoning force—and love not for my soul or for some imagined beauty of my mind, but for the white fetish of my body. I do not want softness. I am soft. My husband uses scented lotions on his hands before he touches me, and his fingers are like thick, damp snails. I want the crush of hard muscles, the delicious pain of little hurts.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“I love you,” he said miserably.

“You speak as though it were some new, tremendous thing. Many men have loved me; hundreds have said they did.”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

Henry released her and stepped away, wiping his bloody face with the back of his hand. Ysobel laughed at him. A man may beat—may subject to every violation—a woman who cries and runs away, but he is helpless before one who stands her ground and only laughs.
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

“It is a legend that dying men think of their deeds done. No— No— I think of what I have not done—of what I might have done in the years that are dying with me. I think of the lips of women I have never seen—of the wine that is sleeping in a grape seed—of the quick, warm caress of my mother in Goaves. But mostly I think that I shall never walk about again—never, never stroll in the sunshine nor smell the rich essences the full moon conjures up out of the earth— Sir, why did you do it?”
—John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 1 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

She thought: Yet I know these are the happy years. And ahead of us are only great disasters.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

People who did not respond to his art profoundly distressed Houdini. He had come to realize they were invariably of the upper classes. Always they broke through the pretense of his life and made him feel foolish. Houdini had high inchoate ambition and every development in technology made him restless. On the shabby confines of a stage he could create wonder and awe. Meanwhile men were beginning to take planes into the air, or race automobiles that went sixty miles an hour. A man like Roosevelt had run at the Spanish on San Juan Hill and now sent a fleet of white battleships steaming around the world, battleships as white as his teeth. The wealthy knew what was important. They looked on him as a child or a fool.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

She was so desperately in love that she could no longer see properly, something had happened to her eyes, and she blinked constantly as if to clear them of the blur. She saw everything through a film of salt tears, and her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and continuous crying which her happiness caused her.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

They made love slowly and sinuously, humping each other into such supple states of orgasm that they found very little reason to talk the rest of the time they were together.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 4 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

But there was an intensity of expectation about his eyes that attracted a fair number of women. He was always so serious and unhappy that they were persuaded he loved them. They took him for a poet.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

A while later Younger Brother found himself in the Cooper Union down near the Bowery. The hall was hot, crowded to overflowing. There were lots of foreigners. Men wore their derbies though indoors. It was a great stinking congress garlicked and perfumed in its own perspiration. It had met in support of the Mexican Revolution. He hadn’t known there was a Mexican Revolution.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

I cannot sympathize. You think you are special, losing your lover. It happens every day. Suppose she consented to live with you after all. You’re a bourgeois, you would want to marry her. You would destroy each other inside of a year. You would see her begin to turn old and bored under your very eyes. You would sit across the dinner table from each other in bondage, in terrible bondage to what you thought was love. The both of you. Believe me you are better off this way.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

I’ll tell you something. In this room tonight you saw my present lover but also two of my former lovers. We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 5 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

‘I—I love her dearly. More than I could tell. Of course one cannot tell. You take a different view of your actions when you come to understand, when you are made to understand every day that your existence is necessary—you see, absolutely necessary—to another person. I am made to feel that. Wonderful.’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

The boat fairly flew; we sweltered side by side in the stagnant superheated air; the smell of mud, of marsh, the primeval smell of fecund earth, seemed to sting our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open an immense portal. The light itself seemed to stir, the sky above our heads widened, a far-off murmur reached our ears, a freshness enveloped us, filled our lungs, quickened our thoughts, our blood, our regrets—and, straight ahead, the forests sank down against the dark-blue ridge of the sea.

I breathed deeply, I revelled in the vastness of the opened horizon, in the different atmosphere that seemed to vibrate with a toil of life, with the energy of an impeccable world. This sky and this sea were open to me.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly gray. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

‘For the last time,’ she cried, menacingly, ‘will you defend yourself?’ ‘Nothing can touch me,’ he said in a last flicker of superb egoism. Tamb' Itam saw her lean forward where she stood, open her arms, and run at him swiftly. She flung herself upon his breast and clasped him round the neck.

‘Ah! but I shall hold thee thus,’ she cried.... ‘Thou art mine!’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Quotations from “City Boy”
Leonard Michaels
1933-2003 American

The words “thank you” sat in my brain like driven spikes.
—Leonard Michaels, “City Boy”

I discovered I was angry. Until she said that I had no idea I was angry. I flicked the cigarette into the gutter and suddenly I knew why. I didn’t love her.
—Leonard Michaels, “City Boy”

Love is infinite and one. Women are not. Neither are men.
—Leonard Michaels, “City Boy”

“Not say anything. Like moral imbeciles go slurp coffee and not say anything? What are we, nihilists or something? Assassins? Monsters?”
—Leonard Michaels, “City Boy”

Her eyes looked at mine. At them as if they were as flat and opaque as hers.... She continued looking at my eyes. I shrugged, looked down. She took my shirt front in a fist like a bite. She whispered. I said, “What?” She whispered again, “Fuck me.” The clock ticked like crickets. The Vlamincks spilled blood. We sank into the rug as if it were quicksand.
—Leonard Michaels, “City Boy”

Quotations

In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
—Andre Maurois

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
—W. Somerset Maugham

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
—Robert Benchley

Quotations from “The State of Grace”
Harold Brodkey
1930-1996 American

I knew many people in the apartments but none in the houses, and this was the ultimate proof, of course, to me of how miserably degraded I was and how far sunken beneath the surface of the sea. I was on the bottom, looking up through the waters, through the shifting bands of light—through, oh, innumerably more complexities than I could stand—at a sailboat driven by the wind, some boy who had a family and a home like other people.
—Harold Brodkey, “The State of Grace”

If my mother was home, I braced myself for unpleasantness, because she didn’t like me to sit and read; she hated me to read. She wanted to drive me outdoors, where I would become an athlete and be like other boys and be popular. It filled her with rage when I ignored her advice and opened a book; once, she rushed up to me, her face suffused with anger, took the book (I think it was Pride and Prejudice), and hurled it out the third-story window. At the time, I sat and tried to sneer, thinking she was half mad, with her exaggerated rage, and so foolish not to realize that I could be none of the things she thought I ought to be.
—Harold Brodkey, “The State of Grace”

The furniture was alive and frightening; it was like that part of the nightmare where it gets so bad that you decide to wake up.
—Harold Brodkey, “The State of Grace”

He was like most of the people I knew—eager and needful of my love; for I was quite remarkable and made incredible games, which were better than movies or than the heart could hope for. I was a dream come true. I was smart and virtuous and fairly attractive, maybe even very attractive. I was often funny and always interesting. I had read everything and knew everything and got unbelievable grades. Of course I was someone whose love was desired. Mother, my teachers, my sister, girls at school, other boys—they all wanted me to love them.

But I wanted them to love me first.

None of them did. I was fierce and solitary and acrid, and there was no one who loved me first. I could see a hundred cravennesses in the people I knew, a thousand flaws, a million weaknesses. If I had to love first, I would love only perfection. Of course, I could help heal the people I knew if I loved them. No, I said to myself, why should I give them everything when they give me nothing?
—Harold Brodkey, “The State of Grace”

I was only thirteen. There isn’t much you can blame a boy of thirteen for, but I’m not thinking of the blame; I’m thinking of all the years that might have been—if I’d only known then what I know now. The waste, the God-awful waste.
—Harold Brodkey, “The State of Grace”

Quotations from *Into the Wild*, 3 of 3
Jon Krakauer
1954- American

For two days I slogged steadily up the valley of ice. The weather was good, the route obvious and without major obstacles. Because I was alone, however, even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than they would have been were I in the company of another person. And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Roman’s observation underscores how difficult it is for those of us preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth. As Everett Ruess’s father mused years after his twenty-year-old son vanished in the desert, “The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent. I think we all poorly understood Everett.”
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

It is not merely the young, of course, who are drawn to hazardous undertakings. John Muir is remembered primarily as a no-nonsense conservationist and the founding president of the Sierra Club, but he was also a bold adventurer, a fearless scrambler of peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls whose best-known essay includes a riveting account of nearly falling to his death, in 1872, while ascending California’s Mt. Ritter. In another essay Muir rapturously describes riding out a ferocious Sierra gale, by choice, in the uppermost branches of a one-hundred-foot Douglas fir:

“[N]ever before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.”

He was thirty-six years old at the time.
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
—Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, in Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Quotations from *Bloodsong*, 1 of 2
Jill Neimark
American

“I wanted to cut my life off like a bad arm, and I did, and Christ I was proud of myself, but you know how they say an amputated arm aches? Well, I ached for my old life. I always seem to be aching for something.”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Everyone has a first and then a last love, he wrote, and it’s the last love that stamps the soul. The first is simple, it’s a flying leap into life. The last must be Gordian in its knot, it permeates every memory, seeps into every pore; counterpoint to fate. It becomes fate. And so the last love is always a shock and an exception. She might be his last love.

“But I’m not gonna fuck you,” she’d retort.

“I don’t need that now.”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

“Y poco a poco me olvide de vivir,” he said. And little by little I forgot how to live.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Virgins, bulls, men and gods; the world must be made to bleed.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

And Nadal said those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart by it. They can follow the call of that misfortune, they can seed affliction in others, until they are so alone that no one can reach them.

But it is that same misfortune that is their gift, and their bridge back to humanity. They must make their way back. He’d tried to make his way back through love. In a tin hut in La Perla on a sunny afternoon he knew he could not.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Quotations from *Bloodsong*, 2 of 2
Jill Neimark
American

He never asked my last name. When I asked if he’d ever been in love, he said, Yes, but I loved the wrong person, and he said it as simply as someone would say, Yes, but I took the wrong turn and that’s why I’m late. I wanted to ask the most stupid, obvious question: Why did you choose the wrong person? But instead I asked him how he liked New York, and he said, I’ve been in New York before and I can tell you, New York and I are not in love with each other. I like the desert and the ocean.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

On a train to Wyoming. It’s surprising how we’re all alike at least on trains.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

I’m twenty-nine and I feel absent from my own life.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

I don’t remember—what’s it like to be the most important person to someone? To say, I’ll never get over you. I’ll never recover.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

“Every puertorriqueno,” says Popi, “is born split in two. He’s like the yagrumo, the tree whose leaves turn from dark to light in the wind. Every one of us is born with this divided self.”

“Divided between what?” I ask, watching him pour milk into his coffee until it’s the color of butterscotch.

“Latin and Anglo,” he says quickly, as if pleased at my indulgence. “Being part American and always the poor cousin. . .”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Quotations from *Everything Is Illuminated*, 2 of 2
Jonathan Safran Foer
1977- American

Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

There was no convincing reason to exist.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

But each was the closest thing to a deserving recipient of love that the other would find. So they gave each other all of it.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

They reciprocated the great and saving lie—that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things—willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

If God exists, He is not to be believed in.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Quotations from *Behold the Man*
Michael Moorcock
1939- English

Lying in the hot, sweaty bed with Monica. Once again, another attempt to make normal love had metamorphosed into the performance of minor aberrations, which seemed to satisfy her better than anything else.

Their real courtship and fulfillment was yet to come. As usual, it would be verbal. As usual, it would find its climax in argumentative anger.
—Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man

It was strange. He was not a religious man in the usual sense. He was an agnostic. It was not conviction that had led him to defend religion against Monica’s cynical contempt for it; it was rather lack of conviction in the ideal in which she had set her own faith, the ideal of science as a solver of all problems.
—Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man

“I can’t accept it.”

“That’s because you’re sick. I’m sick, too, but at least I can see the promise of health.”

“I can only see the threat of death...”
—Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man