"Standing off and saying you don't like the way things are run is kid stuff--any kid can work out a program of more ice cream and less school and free movies and him telling people what to do instead of people always telling him--"
"I don't want any more ice cream, thanks."
"Maybe you don't; but what you're saying is the same damn thing. If things were run according to your ideas instead of the way they are run, it would be much better. Who says so? Why you say so! That's what the dopes, the Communists and so on, all the boys who never grew up, say. Who's going to be better for it? Their fellow-men? Horse feathers!"

--The Just and the Unjust, James Gould Cozzens

James Gould Cozzens (TJatU) on subtleties of workplace politics:

"Four years' service had given him his place in the squabbles and schemings and jealousies and long-holding of grudges that made up so much of the life and world of the school office and the faculty room. Though no longer present, Sam Field would not be quietly released from their talk and thought. In the struggle about to be joined, the coming together in opposition about who was to blame and who would have to pay, they would expose Sam Field anew at every meeting, and retry the case every day for weeks, while his friends hated him for putting them at the disadvantage of having been his friends, and his enemies gloated quietly together, telling each other again and again that they had told each other so."

James Gould Cozzens on impulsiveness and the fateful role it can play: 

"Could he say that confronted by a certain situation he had taken on principle certain steps? He had in fact acted on impulse, in a mood or state of mind in which instead of doing what he really meant to do, he did what he meant to avoid, refused what he really wanted, and with unprovoked pique, out of hand, in a minute, came to new and definite decisions that might--more than might, must!--affect his whole life." 

I know less than nothing about Orthodox iconography, but this passage from Nikolai Levsky's story The Sealed Angel gives a vivid impression of the aesthetic and spiritual delight to be found therein, most especially for Christians, I imagine:

"Luka Kirlovich passionately loved holy icons, and, my dear sirs, he owned the most wonderful icons, of the most artful workmanship, ancient, either real Greek, or of the first Novgorod or Stroganov icon painters. Icon after icon shone not so much by their casings as by the keenness and fluency of their marvelous artistry, I've never seen such loftiness anywhere since! ...You look at Our Lady, how the inanimate trees bow down before her purity, and your heart melts and trembles; you look at the angel...joy! This angel was truly something indescribable. His face--I can see it now--is most brightly divine and so swiftly succoring ; his gaze is tender; his hair is tied with a fine ribbon, its ends curling around his ears, a sign of his hearing everything from everywhere; his robe is shining, all spangled with gold; his armor is feathery, his shoulders are girded; on his chest the face of the infant Emmanuel; in his right hand a cross, in his left a flaming sword. Wondrous! Wondrous!..."

"It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void."

--William James, The Will to Believe

"Inside every revolutionary there is a policeman."

--Gustave Flaubert

James Gould Cozzens, in The Just and The Unjust, on long-standing partisan monopolies. (Obviously, the name of the party could be switched out for another depending on a given local situation.):

"The county had been Republican for almost a generation. This mean that the Republicans were entrenched in power; they had all the jobs. Having all the jobs meant having also an increasing monopoly of the ambitious, able and experienced men. Ambitious men could see the situation; able men could not expect to get anywhere with the Democrats; and as for experience, a Democrat could never be elected, and so could never get any experience."

I normally don't include political links, but this is a culturally relevant post, with historical resonances. Ross Douthat on the PC hullabaloo:

"In a landscape in which older moral systems have been rejected, collapsed or simply been forgotten, moral clarity alone can be a pretty significant advantage. In the kingdom of the bland, the zealot has a lot of material to work with."

Terry Teachout, on why being nutso about Art beats being dyspeptically preoccupied by ideas and politics, every time.

"...as I say, aesthetes have it over intellectuals in one important respect: You’ll rarely catch them hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. For all their frequent foolishness, their hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood."

"There's little point in writing if you can't annoy somebody." 

--Kingsley Amis

"Criminals might be victims of circumstance in the sense that few of them ever had a fair chance; but it was a mistake to forget that the only 'fair chance' they ever wanted was a chance for easy money."

--James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust

"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."

--Samuel Johnson

Will Bradley & His Orchestra, "Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar"

Joseph Epstein on Boswell's "Life of Johnson": 

"The worlds greatest biography was composed by a depressive, a heavy drinker, an inconstant husband and a neglectful father who suffered at least 17 bouts of gonorrhea."

Dave Brubeck, "September Song":

Terry Teachout on Billie Holiday; full of praise, in general, but ends with this: 

"To romanticize self-destructive behavior is always a mistake, even when it is the behavior of a great artist--and it is an even bigger mistake to take such behavior as a sign of greatness."

Clive James on his Latest Readings. Includes this quotation from Joseph Conrad: 

"...peace is not a principle, it is only a desirable state of affairs, and can't be obtained without a capacity for violence at least equal to the violence of the threat."

Max B. on Fate:

"Often I have presentiments of evil; but, never having had one of them fulfilled, I am beginning to ignore them. I find that I have always walked straight, serenely imprescient, into whatever trap Fate has laid for me."

On emotion:

"In every one of us the deepest emotions are constantly caused by some absurdly trivial thing, or by nothing at all. Conversely, the great things in our lives--the true occasions for wrath, anguish, rapture, what not--very often leave us quite calm. We cannot depend on any right adjustment of emotion to circumstance. That is on of many reasons which prevent the philosopher from taking himself and his fellow-beings quite so seriously as he would wish."

Natural Selection by Clive James

The gradual but inexorable magic
That turned the dinosaurs into the birds
Had no overt, only a hidden, logic.
To start the squadrons climbing from the herds
No wand was ever waved, but afterwards
Those who believed there must have been a wizard
Said the whole show looked too well-planned for hazard.

And so it does, in retrospect. Such clever
Transitions, intricate beyond belief!
The little lobsters, in their mating fever,
Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff,
And swept inland as scorpions. But if
Some weapons freak equipped their tails for murder
He must have thought sheer anguish all in order.

Source of all good and hence of evil, pleasure
And hence of pain, he is, or else they are,
Without a moral sense that we can measure,
And thus without a mind. Better by far
To stand in awe of blind chance than to fear
A conscious mechanism of mutation
Bringing its fine intentions to fruition

Without a qualm about collateral horror.
The peacock and the tapeworm both make sense.
Nobody calls the ugly one an error.
But when a child is born to pain intense
Enough to drive its family all at once
To weep blood, an intelligent designer
Looks like a torture garden's beaming owner.

No, give it up. The world demands our wonder
Solely because no feeling brain conceived
The thumb that holds the bamboo for the panda.
Creation, if the thing's to be believed —
And only through belief can life be loved —
Must do without that helping hand from Heaven.
Forget it, lest it never be forgiven.

(Poetry (Chicago), November 2006)

I'm very doubtful about that "solely." Nevertheless, as a statement of naturalist disbelief, this strikes me as pretty well untoppable.

Kingsley Amis pretending to be Robert Conquest (dead today, at 98) on the murderous awfulness of Soviet Communism: "I told you so, you fucking fools."

J. Barzun on Columbus' bum rap:

"The Spanish colonists committed atrocities from greed and and racist contempt that nothing can palliate or excuse. But to blame Colombus is a piece of retrospective lynching; he was not the master criminal inspiring all the rest. It is moreover a mistake to think that because the native peoples were the sufferers, all of them were peaceable innocents. The Caribs whom Columbus first encountered had fought and displaced the Anawaks who occupied the islands. The Aztecs whom Cortez conquered had originally descended from the north and destroyed the previous civilization. To the north and east many of the tribes lived in perpetual warfare, the strong exploiting the weak, and several—notably the Iroqouis—had slaves. In short, what happened on the newfound hemisphere in early modern times continued the practice of the old: in Ancient Greece alien tribes marching in from the north; likewise in the making of the Roman Empire, in the peopling of the British Isles by Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans; In France, Italy, and Spain by Franks, Normans, Lombards, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and later, by Arabs. Everywhere the story is one of invasion, killing, rape, and plunder and occupation of the land that belonged to the vanquished. Today, this fusion or dispersion of peoples is abhorred in principle but flourishing in fact. Africa, the Middle and Far East, and South Central Europe are still theaters of conquest and massacre. And Columbus is not the responsible party."

M. Beerbohm on friendship:

"Old friends are generally the refuge of unsociable persons."

On royalty and government:

"There are some persons who would fain abolish altogether the institution of royalty. Our royal family is a rather absurd institution, no doubt. But then, humanity itself is rather absurd. A State can never be more than a kindergarten, at best, and he who would fain rule men according to principles of right reason will fare no better than did poor dear Plato at Syracuse. Put the dream of doctrinaire into practice, and it will soon turn to some such nightmare as modern France or Modern America. Indeed, fallacies and anomalies are the basis of all good government."

J. Barzun on Christopher Colombus, cranks, and innovators:

"The whole saga, including the sailors' distrust and their leader's deliberate deception; the success and the mistake at the heart of it; the glorification followed by the disgrace during and after the second voyage (the hero led back in chains); the persistence and the final neglect and poverty—every feature of his career is part of a typical pattern. Not all, but many of the great achievements of western man have followed this tortuous course, visiting more or less harsh punishment on the doers. This "tradition" is not the result of perversity. It is not the clash of stupid men opposing an intelligent one: Columbus's interviewers were right to question his calculation of the distance to India: he made it 2,400 miles short of the actual 10,600. And it is true that the promoters of the really new more often look and talk like cranks and mis-state or mistake their goal. Their behavior is often arrogant or seems so from their impatience with cautious minds. The upshot—humiliation and penury—is disproportionate to the offense, but it expresses the culture's need to defend its rational ways, to ward off genuine cranks, and to avoid moving too fast into the untried. There is no evidence that the present system of subsidizing innovations—government and foundation grants—works any better than that of the kings and queens of earlier times: the same committee is always sitting at the gate."

Max Beerbohm on writing history:

"To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would require a far less brilliant pen than mine."

IB Singer on polygamy:

"It's one thing to have an adventure—it's quite another to make a permanent institution out of it."

Michael Oakeshott on love:

“The phenomenon of love, perhaps, more than anything else, shows the secondary place of justice and morality in human life.”

John Gray on Michael Oakeshott.

Max Beerbohm on Philosophy:

"I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than another. That in itself is a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one I can make head or tail of."

Michael Oakeshott (in Present, Future and Past) on an "encapsulated" past:

“...since we are concerned with what happened in respect of its reflection in what we are, we should perhaps include our genetic past: the organization of genes which distinguished that unknown great-grandfather which now appears in the colour of my eyes and the shape (and, in part, the skill) of my hands. What comes after may modify what went before, but it cannot expunge it. Layer upon layer; all a great and contingent mixture from which we cannot escape but to which what we are and what we do now is somehow a response.”

"Not to have the instinct to command implies a lack of the instinct to obey. The two aptitudes are but different facets of one jewel: the sense of order."

—Max Beerbohm, Servants

Fairfield Porter on—what else?—Art, or rather, having a certain artistic point of view:

"Wholeness is as close to you as yourself and your immediate surroundings. You need not pursue it, you have only to accept it. What is real and what is alive is concrete and singular. In a statement of esthetic belief  Pasternak said, "'Poetry is in the grass.'"

VN (in Pnin) on one of the inherent difficulties of absentmindedness:

"Because of a streak of dreaminess and a gentle abstraction in his nature, Victor in any qeue was always at its very end. He had long since grown used to this handicap, as one grows used to weak sight or a limp."

Max Beerbohm on a sort of political philosophy:

"Anarchistic? Yes; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather lame one that I am a Tory anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased—short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed."

Fairfield Porter on Revolutionists:

“It is..from the unemployed intellectuals that the Bolsheveki were drawn; in fact this is the class that contributes the membership of all revolutionary organizations of both right and left. The successful revolutionist is one who is able to force society to give him the place of command that society has taught him to believe he deserves.”

“Social consciousness devalues everything except revolutionary activity. It devalues itself, like those toys that destroy themselves. In saying that what is, is bad, it inhibits the artist's experience and causes him to fall into the cliches from previous styles. The artist knows everything and uses his eyes only to keep his hand from slipping."

JB on Revolution (FDtD):

“The cultural predicament after a revolution is how to reinstate community, how to live with those you have execrated and fought against with all imaginable cruelty.”

Jacques Barzun on Revolution (From Dawn to Decadence):

“Revolutions paradoxically being by promising freedom and then turn coercive and 'puritanical,' to save themselves from both discredit and reaction. Creating a purer life requires that people forget other aims; therefore public and private life must be regimented. That is why the theme applicable to revolution is Emancipation and not Freedom. Old shackles are thrown off, tossed high in the air, but come down again as moral duty well enforced.”

"Herman Gombiner considered himself to be among the select few privileged to see beyond the facade of phenomena. He had seen a blotter raise itself from the desk, slowly and unsteadily float toward the door, and once there, float gently down, as if suspended by an invisible string held by some unseen hand. The whole thing had been thoroughly senseless. No matter how much Herman thought about it, he was unable to figure out any reason for what had taken place. It had been one of those extraordinary happenings that cannot be explained by science, or religion, or folklore. Later, Herman had bent down and picked up the blotter, and placed it back on the desk, where it remained to this day, covered with papers, dusty, and dried out—an inanimate object that for one moment had somehow freed itself from physical laws."

—IB Singer, The Letter Writer

—St. Francis and the Skull, Francisco de Zubaran

VN on sharpening pencils, Pnin:

"With the help of a janitor he screwed into the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must."

Fairfield Porter on Greek sculpture:

"We all know that the Greeks took for granted the high value they placed on their sculpture. Such an unreasonable conviction of value is contagious, like the attraction exerted by a narcissistic person."

—Paolo Uccello, St. George and the Dragon 

 The absence of teeth in VN’s Pnin:

“It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.”

Fairfield Porter on painter John Marin:

“The largeness of his vision has something shy about it, a holding off; he does not touch things closely. The imprecision is only imprecision.”

—John Marin, Mt. Chocorua No. 1

“Discipline is sweetened by compromise.”

—Fairfield Porter

Lawrence Klepp on Art and the Renaissance:

“Great art…rarely appears in peaceful, pastoral societies, whether Switzerland, Lapland, or some tropical island paradise. It tends to turn up in wealthy, multifaceted, and tumultuous urban societies such as 15th-century northern Italy. Their usual accompaniment of high ambition, greed, steep social hierarchies, crimes of passion and calculation, and political and amorous intrigues provide either the subject matter for the art or the motivation to escape and transcend them through form, color, and harmony.”

Fairfield Porter on meaning in Art:

"Some art has a very open meaning, and can be written about in terms of this meaning; but the chances are that if the meaning is the most interesting thing about it, it does not stand alone, it does not assert itself. It leans on what it means. An implied meaning is richer."

"Our virtues lose themselves in selfishness as rivers are lost in the sea."

—La Rochefoucauld 

Fairfield Porter on non-objective, or "abstract" painting:

"Critics who find non-objectivity anti-traditional, do not see that tradition is a process. It leads to non-objectivity like this: first, acceptance of nature as including the artist, who is, like one of the details of his painting, an equal part of creation; next, a questioning of what things are, of what we see; then a questioning of how we see; from here to a consideration of vision itself; then to the one who sees, the artist as part of a duality of nature and recipient; to the artist in introspection, and a denial of objectivity."

Colin Fleming on Schumann's Violin Concerto in D Minor, lost for a hundred years; "[it breaks] through the black and the haze to touch the palms of angels."

Memory in V. Nabokov's Ada:

"It aggrieved him—that complete collapse of the past, the dispersal of its itinerant court and music-makers, the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance."

Terry Teachout on the death of the love song.

Lee Wiley sings Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea:

Murray Ringold on ideology, in Philip Roth's I Married a Communist:

"...when you decide to contribute your personal problem to an ideology's agenda, everything that is personal is squeezed out and discarded and all that remains is what is useful to the ideology."

George Orwell on autobiography:

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

Joseph Epstein on Speak, Memory.

Fairfield Porter on the meaning of Art, Art in its Own Terms:

"To ask the meaning of art is like asking the meaning of life: experience comes before a measurement against a value system. And the question whether art has any meaning, like the same question about life, may not be answerable at all. It can be answered by each person for himself, and it is doubtful how well this answer can be communicated. What counts is personal experience, and therefore, what the critic can do, in fact all he can do, is to describe his experience as sensitively as possible."

LE Sissman on working in an office:

"At its best the office is a place where your training and your ego get at least an intermittent chance to shine; where you work with others who, with luck, may include you in a team of motivated, purposeful people combining forces to achieve a goal; where you work for something more than survival alone. In that kind of office, your time is not wasted, your life is not frittered away in eight-hour segments; however trivial the product may be, you are actively furthering your life while earning a living."

Danny Heitman on the poet LE Sissman.

Anthony Paletta on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

"Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, love and hate, mercy and cruelty and other conflicting emotions often blend and cannot be separated from each other. Thus I am able not only to make people turn away from the Creator, but to damage their own bodies, all in the name of some imaginary cause."

—Satan from IB Singer's The Destruction of Kreshev

"Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusuable."

—Paul Valery

"Photography is an art if the photographer loves it enough, and if the juror who selects the show responds."

—Fairfield Porter, "Art in its Own Terms"

There is no health; physicians say that we
at best enjoy but a neutrality.
And can there be worse sickness than to know
That we are never born well, nor can be so?
We are born ruinous...

—John Donne, "An Anatomy of the World"

"...the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach the method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects—Basic Basque and so forth—spoken only by certain elaborate machines."

"His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence."

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

"The fact is a wire through which one sends a current."

—Saul Bellow

"The necessary premise is that a man is somehow more than the his 'characteristics,' all the emotions, strivings, tastes and constructions it pleases to call 'My Life.' We have ground to hope that a Life is something more than a such a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light."

—Saul Bellow, Herzog

"Good taste is not essential, and it is often a brake on energy."

-Fairfield Porter, Art in its Own Terms

"A magnificent temple is a laudable monument of national taste and religion, and the enthusiast who entered the dome of St. Sophia, might be tempted to suppose that it was the residence, or even the workmanship of the Deity. Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!"

-Sir Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall

"Every law, either human or divine, was trampled under foot, and as long as the party was succesful, its deluded followers appeared careless of private distress or public calamity."

-Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

On art scholarship and movements: 

"It is the economic pressure on scholarship exerted by the universities that lead to the naming of movements in the arts, and once a movement is named, it is justified by words, and the literature around it gives it critical validity."

On the sculpture of Giacometti: 

"The roughness of the modeling can be thought of as the beating anything takes in an assertion of its existence against the vastness of the universe. It is its dignity, its payment for existence against the weight of indifferent adversity. The complications of the surface are, as it were, the scars of battles of limited assertion."

-Fairfield Porter, Art in its Own Terms

Joseph Epstein on the hook shot:

“I shall never forget the afternoon, sometime along about my thirteenth year, when, shooting baskets alone, I came upon the technique for shooting the hook. Although today it has nowhere near the consequence of the jump shot—an innovation that has been to basketball what the jet has been to air travel—the hook is still the single most beautiful shot in the game. The rhythm and grace of it, the sway of the body off the pivot, the release of the ball behind the head and off the fingertips, the touch and instinct involved in its execution, make the hook an altogether balletic thing, and to achieve it is to feel one of the most delectable sensations in sports. That afternoon, on a deserted side street, shooting on a rickety wooden backboard and a black rim without a net, I felt it and grew nearly drunk on the feeling. Rain came down, dirt washed in the gutters, flecks of it spattering my clothes and arms and face, but, soaked and cold though I was, I do not think I would have left that basket on that afternoon for anything. I threw up hook after hook, from every angle, from farther and farther out, off the board, without the board, and hook after hook went in. Only pitch darkness drove me home.”

-JE, Masters of the Game

Nabokov's Speak, Memory:

...shady recesses would then harbor that special boletic reek which makes a Russian's nostrils dilate—a dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, rotting leaves.

Boletic=pertaining to, or obtained from the Boletus (a mushroom); boletic acid

Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

Terry Teachout on liking Art:

As it happens...I’ve changed my mind about art more than once, and in so doing I’ve learned that I not infrequently start by disliking something and end up liking it. Not always—sometimes I decide on close acquaintance that a novel or painting isn’t as good as I’d thought. (I used to like Picasso’s Guernica a lot more than I do now.) More often, though, I realize that it was necessary for me to grow into a fuller understanding of a work of art to which my powers of comprehension were not at first equal. The music critic Hans Keller said something shrewd about this phenomenon: “As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it.” 

Toward the end of a long run, I was tottering back to Pioneer Park with a friend, nearly there, when he urged us to stop at a used book sale on Virginia Lane. Just above Parkhill there's a sprawling house at the edge of a little pond, overfrequented by flocks of ducks, where an older fellow, a former used book shop owner, sets out fully-stocked shelves in his garage and laden tables on his gravel driveway. There didn't seem to be all that much to tempt the wallet—Tom Clancy, Nicholas Sparks, faceless bodice-rippers—but I did come across a hardback copy of  Nabokov's "Lectures on Literature" for 5 bucks—swell deal—and drove by later to pick it up. Perusing the hodgepodge, I also found IB Singer's "Collected Stories" for 6 dollars. Goes to show that at almost any book sale, there’s usually a diamond in the rough; even two, three, or a dozen or more. In general, it’s worth intermitting the day to stop and take a look, at the obvious risk of piling onto one's already excessive book freight.

On the perils of writing fiction—IB Singer, Collected Stories

In the process of creating [stories], I have become aware of the many dangers that lurk behind the writer of fiction. The worst of them are: 1. The idea that the writer must be a sociologist and a politician, adjusting himself to what are called social dialectics. 2. Greed for money and quick recognition. 3. Forced originality—namely, the illusion that pretentious rhetoric, precious innovations in style, and playing with artificial symbols can express the basic and ever-changing nature of human relations, or reflect the combinations and complications of hereditary and environment. These verbal pitfalls of so-called “experimental” writing have done damage even to genuine talent; they have destroyed much of modern poetry by making it obscure, esoteric, and charmless. Imagination is one thing, and the distortion of what Spinoza called “the order of things” is something else entirely. Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself.

Jean Cocteau on Proust: 

A giant miniature, full of mirages, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time.

Frederic Raphael on Famous Actresses I Have Known

HBO’s Olive Kitteridge is elegant, amusing and quietly (and unquietly) devastating.

Nabokov's Speak, Memory:

"This schismatic mood revealed itself in her healthy distaste for the ritual of the Greek Catholic Church and for its priests. She found a deep appeal in the moral and poetical side of the Gospels, but felt no need to support any dogma. The appalling insecurity of an afterlife and its lack of privacy did not enter her thoughts. Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life."

Paul Ingrassia, Engines of Change:

"Driving a BMW was like wearing a form-fitting, trim-cut Italian designer suit instead of sturdy but boxy threads from Brooks Brothers. Mercedes gave top priority to big cars, which made its smaller cars feel like cheap versions of the real thing. But BMW's roots lay in small cars. Its bigger models, the 5 series and 7 series, evolved from its small cars, which remained at the core of the company. "Eine Wurst, drei Grosse," the company's engineers would say, meaning, 'one sausage, three sizes.' That wouldn't become an advertising slogan, mercifully, but the point was clear."

Max Ophul's Le Plaisir (1952) based on three lovely stories by Maupassant.

All is Lost is an arresting and beautiful film.

Joseph Epstein on Proust's original English translator, CK Scott Moncrieff

I didn't want a life of having to deal with everybody. Every old woman, every drunk or wife of a drunk, the constant traffic of people which is the priest's work.

—FH Powers, on why he didn't become a priest

Christopher Cadwell on Calvin & Hobbes:

The late political scientist James Q. Wilson described “Calvin and Hobbes” as “our only popular explication of the moral philosophy of Aristotle.” Wilson meant that the social order is founded on self-control and delayed gratification—and that Calvin is hopeless at these things. Calvin thinks that “life should be more like TV” and that he is “destined for greatness” whether he does his homework or not. His favorite sport is “Calvinball,” in which he is entitled to make up the rules as he goes along.

Terry Teachout on Peggy Lee

Her sultry version of "Fever."

From Nabokov's Speak Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tell us that our existence is but a brief crak of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). (19)

I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was non other than the pure element of time. One shared it--just as excited bathers share shining sea water--with creatures that were not oneself that were joined to one by time's common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. (21-22)

I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known. (25)

...as if the singular were to thin to bear the load of her love.. (28)

...the sad (but interesting, I thought) necessity of blowing up tyrants... (29)

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. (36)