Thursday Thirteen: Quotes I've Loved

From the time I was 17 until I started my MFA program at age 23, I kept an occassional journal of quotations from my readings. I found the journal last week as I was preparing for the August 10th TT and decided to mine it for this week's list.

Unfortunately, I didn't list the books in which I found the quotes--only the authors.

1. "Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting." Elizabeth Bowen

2. "People in novels have to need something, she thinks, that it takes about two hundred pages to get." Marie Ponso

3. "It seems to me you spend a great deal of time in the element you dissaprove of." Edith Wharton

4. "To be free from convention is not to spurn it, but not to be deceived by it." Alan Watts

5. "The wisdom that a wise man ties to communicate always sounds foolish." Herman Hesse

6. "A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality." Saul Bellow

7. "You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity." William Faulkner

8. "... the air ran into the mouth like wine." EM Forester

9. "I acted toward my brother the way I had acted toward him all my life, heard what I wanted to hear, rejected the rest." John Wideman

10. "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Ralph Waldo Emerson

11. "I'll never stop believing in justice. It's just that I've learned it's pointless to look for it in certain situations." Andre Brink

12. "What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?" Kahlil Gibran

13. "Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge." Robert Pirsig

I'm actually throwing in an extra Pirsig quote because I'm smack in the middle of rereading Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

14. "The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling."

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Tags: Thursday Thirteen William Faulkner Saul Bellow Robert Pirsig Marie Ponso Andre Brink John Wideman Ralph Waldo Emerson EM Forester Herman Hesse Edith Warton Elizabeth Bowen