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

Spring, spring! Like a mad magician flinging silks and colored rags from his trunk the earth produced the yellow and white crocus, then the fox grape, the forsythia flowering on its stalks, the blades of iris, the apple tree blossoms of pink and white and green, the heavy lilac and the daffodil. Grandfather stood in the yard and gave a standing ovation. A breeze came up and blew from the maples a shower of spermatozoic soft-headed green buds. They caught in his sparse gray hair. He shook his head with delight, feeling a wreath had been bestowed. A joyful spasm took hold of him and he stuck his leg out in an old man’s jig, lost his balance, and slid on the heel of his shoe into a sitting position. In this manner he cracked his pelvis and entered a period of declining health from which he would not recover.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He remembered his attempt to escape from a coffin, the terror when he realized he could not. The coffin had a trick lid but he had not anticipated the weight of the earth. He had clawed at the earth, feeling its monumental weight. He had screamed into its impenetrable silence. He knew what it was to be sealed in the earth but he felt now it was the only place for him.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

During his absence when she had made certain decisions regarding the business, all its mysterious potency was dissipated and she saw it for the dreary unimaginative thing it was. No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“The girl dreams of her lover”
Konstantin Vanshenkin
1925- Russian
translated by Daniel Weissbort

The girl dreams of her lover at night,
And he of her.
He dreams of her full lips,
Her long eyelashes.

The elderly poet dreams
Of splendid lines.
Never did life call forth from him
Poems so fine.

Of sums and calculations the schoolboy dreams,
Of inkwells.
The happy woman dreams her man’s
Unfaithful.

And all these folk have different,
Incongruous dreams.

While, like children, pilots dream
Simply of flying.

Six-Word Novel
Cameron

No, no, no, no, no...yes.

Quotations from *Last of the Breed*
Louis L'Amour
1908-1988 American

When prisoners were brought before Colonel Zamatev, they were frightened or wary. They had all heard the stories of brainwashings and torture, yet there was in this man no evidence of fear or of doubt in himself. Zamatev was irritated by a faint, uneasy feeling.
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

His smile was warm as he greeted Yakov. "Come! Sit by the fire! It is good to see you!"

"I am afraid there is little time for sitting, comrade. You are to be arrested. You must leave this place at once."
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

So many things worth doing may seem foolish to others, may seem impossible.
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

"There are millions of Americans who would like to see Lake Baikal and the Kamchatka Peninsula. If Russia would tear down the Berlin Wall, and build more good hotels, we Americans would be all over your country spending money, making friends, seeing the beauties of Russia, and making ridiculous all that both countries are spending on munitions."
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

He was not blundering, wishing, complaining, or hopeless. He was going somewhere, and he knew where he was going and how to get there...
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

"Speak to the spirits of the sea, Grandfather. My voice is lonely in the night."
—Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed

“It seems to me I’m resurrected”
Leonid Martynov
1905-1980 Russian
translated by J.R. Rowland

It seems to me I’m resurrected.
I lived. My name was Hercules.
Then, I weighed at least a ton.
Roots and all I tore up trees,
Stretched my hand and touched the skies.
When I sat down I broke the chairs.
I died. And now I’m resurrected:
Normal height and normal size
Like other people. Kind and gay,
When I sit down I don’t break chairs.
But all the same, I’m Hercules.

Six-Word Story
Tobias Wolff
1945- American

She gave. He took. He forgot.

Quotations

Whenever I saw a rich person I would ask where their money was from. Oil would be a common answer, or real estate, or steel... The answer was never, "Poetry—their money's from poetry, Fran."
—Fran Lebowitz

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.
—Dylan Thomas

“How terrible it is”
anonymous
Russian
translated by Bradley Jordan

How terrible it is to trust no one,
to have neither joys, nor friends,
and to never open when someone knocks
at the fettered doors of the soul.

But it’s worse to be the one who knocks,
calling another from inside yourself
to open the door, to see, to take fright,
then quickly to lock up again.

Six-Word Memoir
Bjorn Stromberg

Found true love, married someone else.

Quotations from “The Emptied Prairie”
*National Geographic* magazine, 2008 January
Charles Bowden
1945- American

A torn page from a textbook flutters in the breeze from a broken window in the Gascoyne school. The lesson reads: “Write the Other Word for CRY, AFTER, BAD, ALWAYS, GOOD-BY, LOST, and DARK.”
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

Ghost towns stud North Dakota, and this empty house is just one bone in a giant skeleton of abandoned human desire.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

Bjella explains the man walked the tracks each day for the two miles into town, did this year after year. One day he apparently did not hear the train and was killed. Bjella pauses, lets the tale float almost weightlessly in the air with its whisper of suicide. Self-destruction is not a forbidden subject in North Dakota, and people easily tick off cases in their neighborhoods. One woman came across a death book compiled in the early decades of the 20th century. She says the records show a remarkable number of people killed by trains.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

He’s looked through his granddad’s diary from 1908 and notes, “a lot of the entries are about wind.”

“There were a lot of suicides,” he says.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

He and his brothers and his late friend Oscar all served in World War II. Every winter he’d go by Oscar’s and say, “Well, do you remember how you were years ago at this time?” and Oscar would always answer, “Cold.”
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

You know I sit here alone for six months at a time, nobody comes to see me. I’ve outlived them all.
—Ragnar Slaaen, in “The Emptied Prairie” by Charles Bowden

“Knows Nothing”
Neil Lawful
1970- Irish

Standing there waiting
Waiting patiently
He had not got a care
People came and went
Some even began to stare
He was aware thinking
Sometimes reminiscing
Seen a young couple kissing
Trucks and cars
People and dogs
Oh why do they stare
At the man
Who doesn’t have a care
He will accept and
Maybe sometimes he too will stare
But after all he is
The man who knows
The man who knows anything
Knows he knows nothing.

Six-Word Story
Frank Miller
1957- American

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 1 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country ships. They had now a horror of the home service, with its harder conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short passages, good deckchairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes—would have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got charge of a boat on the coast of China—a soft thing; how this one had an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the Siamese navy; and in all they said—in their actions, in their looks, in their persons—could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with a hundred pounds round-the-world tickets in their pockets. There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person—this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,—the ship-wrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“This Be The Verse”
Philip Larkin
1922-1985 English

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Six-Word Story
James P. Blaylock
1950- American

Nevertheless, he tried a third time.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 2 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward! What we get—well, we won’t talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality—in no other is the beginning all illusion—the disenchantment more swift—the subjugation more complete. Hadn’t we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of imprecation?
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth...
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

And he had been deliberating upon death—confound him! He had found that to meditate about because he thought he had saved his life, while all its glamour had gone with the ship in the night.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He was then working for De Jongh, on my recommendation. Water-clerk.... You can’t imagine a mode of life more barren of consolation, less capable of being invested with a spark of glamour—unless it be the business of an insurance canvasser.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

To bury him would have been such an easy kindness! It would have been so much in accordance with the wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency—the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends. Perhaps he did take it too much to heart.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

...still the idea obtrudes itself that he made so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that matters. He was not—if I may say so—clear to me. He was not clear. And there is a suspicion he was not clear to himself either. There were his fine sensibilities, his fine feelings, his fine longings—a sort of sublimated, idealised selfishness. He was—if you allow me to say so—very fine; very fine—and very unfortunate. A little coarser nature would not have borne the strain; it would have had to come to terms with itself—with a grunt, or even with a guffaw; a still coarser one would have remained invulnerably ignorant and completely uninteresting.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Suicide Is Painless”
theme song to M*A*S*H
Mike Altman
1955- American

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see

That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

I try to find a way to make
All our little joys relate
Without that ever-present hate
But now I know that it’s too late

The game of life is hard to play
I’m gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I’ll someday lay
So this is all I have to say

The only way to win is cheat
And lay it down before I’m beat
And to another give my seat
For that’s the only painless feat

The sword of time will pierce our skins
It doesn’t hurt when it begins
But as it works its way on in
The pain grows stronger, watch it grin

A brave man once requested me
To answer questions that are key
“Is it to be or not to be?”
And I replied, “Oh why ask me?”

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

And you can do the same thing if you please

Six-Word Memoir
George Saunders
1958- American

Started small, grew, peaked, shrunk, vanished.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 3 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

The time was coming when I should see him loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess forming round his name as though he had been the stuff of a hero.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He, on his side, had that faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Stein lifted his hand. ‘And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘It seems to me that some would have been very fine—if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don’t know.’ ‘Whether his were fine or not,’ I said, ‘he knows of one which he certainly did not catch.’ ‘Everybody knows of one or two like that,’ said Stein; ‘and that is the trouble—the great trouble....’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Yes! few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I don’t know how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion—I don’t care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Shiloh:
A Requiem”
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
O’er the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh --
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain,
Through the pauses of the night --
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh --
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there --
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve --
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.

Six-Word Story
Howard Waldrop
1946- American

Rained, rained, rained, and never stopped.