The Stranger much of various life had seen,
Been poor, been rich, and in the state between;
Had much of kindness met, and much deceit,
And all that man who deals with men must meet.
Not much he read; but from his youth had thought,
And been by care and observation taught:
'Tis thus a man his own opinion makes;
He holds that fast, which he with trouble takes;
While one whose notions all from books arise,
Upon his authors, not himself, relies -
A borrowed wisdom this, that does not make us wise.

—George Crabbe, The Family of Love

"Betting the horses is not something I advocate, but there is a great deal to be said in defense of handicapping, and I have often thought, and occasionally argued with people who considered themselves educators, that courses in handicapping should be required, like composition and Western Civilization, in our universities. For sheer complexity, there's nothing like a horse race, excepting life itself, and keeping the myriad factors in balanced consideration is fine mental training, provided the student understands that even if he does this perfectly there is no guarantee of success. The scientific handicapper will never beat the horses (Untemeyer was correct, of course), but he will learn to be alert for subtleties that escape the less trained eye. To weight and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at."

—Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbearable slow machine
That brings you what you'll get.

—from The Life With a Hole in It, Philip Larkin

No soldiers in the scenery,
No thoughts of people now dead,
As they were fifty years ago,
Young and living in a live air,
Young and walking in the sunshine,
Bending in blue dresses to touch something,
Today the mind is not part of the weather.

Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.

—Wallace Stevens, A Clear Day and No Memories

"He sometimes thought of the life she might have been living ever since he had known her,—and the one she had chosen to live. From that disparity, he believed, came the sublest thrill of her fascination. She mocked outrageously at the proprieties she observed, and inherited the magic of contradictions."

—Willa Cather, A Lost Lady

A guitar recital by David Russell:

An illustrated rendering of the ancient city of Cahokia, whose ruins--or mounds--are found in present-day Illinois, across the river from St. Louis. David Reynolds, writing in America, Empire of Liberty: "Archeologists now believe that Cahokia was virtually an Indian metropolis covering nearly six square miles, which flourished in the late eleventh century when the Normans were conquering England. Row houses and courtyard mansions lined streets that led to large public plazas. The huge platform mound were capped by temples, tombs, or palaces--the top of the largest mound is the size of a soccer field--and Cahokia did not stand alone because satellite mounds spread out across the fertile floodplain of the Mississippi. In fact, Cahokia is the biggest prehistoric earthwork still surviving anywhere in the Americas."

Richard III, Shakespeare: "Thus I clothe my own naked villainy with odd old ends stolen out of holy writ and seem a saint...Then I sigh, and with a piece of Scripture tell them that God bids us to do evil for good."

Montaigne on Education:

...this education is to be carried on with severe gentleness, not as is customary. Instead of being invited to letters, children are shown in truth nothing but horror and cruelty. Away with violence and compulsion! There is nothing to my mind which so depraves and stupefies a wellborn nature. If you would like him to fear shame and chastisement, don't harden him to them. Harden him to sweat and cold, wind and sun, and the dangers that he must scorn; wean him from all softness and delicacy in dressing and sleeping, eating and drinking; accustom him to everything. Let him not be a pretty boy and a little lady, but a lusty and vigorous youth.

William James in The Sentiment of Rationality:

He who commands himself not to be credulous of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them. Scepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. In theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise skepticism, we are really doing voluntary military service for one side or the other.

"You're a skeptic, Mike. You know what my boss says? He says that skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take off the leash."

—Archie in Rex Stout's Fer de Lance

The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.

—Richard Russo, Empire Falls

"As concerns war, this is how it is among them. When a Scythian kills his first man, he drinks his blood; of all those he kills in battle he carries the heads to the king. When he has brought in a head, he takes a share of whatever loot they have obtained, but without bringing a head he has none. The warrior scalps the head thus: he cuts it in a circle round the ears and, taking the head in his hands, shakes it loose. Then he cleans out the flesh with the rib of an ox and kneads the skin with his hands. When he has softened it all, he has got himself, as it were, a napkin. He hangs the napkin from the bridle of the horse he rides himself and takes great pride in it. The man who has most skins as napkins is judged the greatest man among these people."

--Herodutus, 4.64

"If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, make you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be."

--Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

...wherever speech is necessary, lying and self-deception are both possible.

--WH Auden

Who am I?...Several answers are plausible, but there can no more be one definitive answer than there can be one definitive history of the Thirty Years' War.

--WH Auden

The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

-Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

"On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon in the west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then one of them darted away from the group and shot off into the guazy blue with a soft little trail of light, like laughter."

--Willa Cather, Coming, Aphrodite!

"Sully didn't know too many people who got smarter over the course of a lifetime. Some made fewer mistakes, but in Sully's opinion that was because they couldn't go quite so fast. They had less energy, not more virtue; fewer opportunities to screw up, not more wisdom."

--Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

Why does God not spare the innocent?

The answer to that is not in
the same world as the question
so you would shrink from me
in terror if I could answer it.

--"The Knockdown Question", Les Murray

Shade makes colors loom and be thoughtful.
It has the afterlife atmosphere
but also the philosophic stone cool.

It is both day and night civilized,
the colour of reading, the tone
of inside, and of inside the mind.

--Les Murray, Rooms of the Sketch Garden

At a certain stage in the development of every science a degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility.

--William James, The Principles of Psychology

“Odd, how our view of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn’t. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many other remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we’re curious to know what’s behind that next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done , we’ll have found not just our true destination but also its meaning. The young see life this way, front to back, their eyes to the telescope that anxiously scans the infinite sky and its myriad possibilities. Religion, seducing us with free will while warning us of our responsibility, reinforces youth’s need to see itself at the dramatic center, saying yes to this and no to that, against the backdrop of a great moral reckoning.

But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity. In our weariness we begin to sense the truth, that more doors have closed behind than remain ahead, and for the first time we’re tempted to swing the telescope around and peer at the world through the wrong end—though who can say it’s wrong? How different things look then! Larger patterns emerge, individual decisions receding into insignificance. To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy.”

—from Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs

"Like all art dealers, Hugh believed himself to be an integral part of the creative process. As if it would be foolish for any painter to embark on a new work without first conferring with the man who would later sell it. He didn't really want Noonan to stop painting it, of course. Though unfinished, it was still the best canvas in the room, and Hugh had to know it. Even as he suggested the painting wasn't salable, he was busy coming up with a plan to do just that. What he was really after was the story behind it. People who bought art at these prices were hungry for backstory, gossip they could repeat to their friends. Here, Hugh could explain, was one of Robert Noonan's final canvases, begun when he'd first become aware of the illness that would eventually kill him. Ka-ching!

Talk. Vital to commerce. The end of art."

--Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

"Popular revolutionary violence was not some sort of boiling subterranean lava that finally forced its way to the onto the surface of French politics and then proceeded to scald all those who stepped in its way. Perhaps it would be better to think of the revolutionary elite as rash geologists, themselves gouging open great holes in the crust of polite discourse and then feeding the angry matter through the pipes of their rhetoric out into the open. Volcanoes and steam holes do not seem innapropriate metaphors here, because contemporaries were themselves constantly invoking them."

--Simon Schama, Citizens

"Lovers of poetry may total a million people
on the whole planet. Fewer than the players of skat."

--Les Murray, The Instrument

"The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all of their forms . . . Pharisaism, dullwittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants’ homes and police stations. I see them in science, in literature, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no particular predilection for policemen, butchers, scientists, writers or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist."

--Anton Checkov, Oct. 4 1888, in a letter 

"Question. Why am I keeping this diary? Answer. Because it is part of the insane desire to perpetuate oneself. Because there seems to be a lot of things I want to say that other writers put into novels and accepted essayists into essays. Because it will be a relief to set down just what I do actually think, and in the first words to hand, instead of pondering what I ought to think and worrying about the words in which to express the hammered-out thought. But I cannot and never could invent a story, or be bothered to tell it, and have already published five books of essays, not having to do with the theater, that have been complete and utter failures. So I am driven to this last ditch of expression."

--James Agate June 3, 1932 in Ego

"Those who accuse men of always gaping after future things, and teach us to lay hold of present goods and settle ourselves in them, since we have no grip on what is to come (indeed a good deal less than we have on what is past), put their finger on the commonest of human errors--it they dare to call an error something to which Nature herself leads us in serving the continuation of her work, and which, more zealous for our action than for our knowledge, she imprints in us like many other false notions. We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be. A soul anxious about the future is the most vulnerable [Seneca]."

--Montaigne, Essays

"For every complex problem there is a simple solution. And it's always wrong."

--H.L. Mencken

"Terror and dictatorship swallowed up their creators. The State, which had seemed to be a means, had now proved to be an end in itself. The people who had created this State had seen it as a means of realizing their ideals. It turned out, however, that their dreams and ideals had been a means employed by a great and terrible State. The State was no longer servant but a grim autocrat. It was not the people who needed the Red Terror of 1919. It was not the people who did away with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It was not the people who needed the death of millions of peasants--most of the people, after all, were peasants. It was not the people who chose, in 1937, to fill the prisons and camps. It was not the people who needed the murderous deportations, the resettlement in Siberia and Central Asia, of the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens, and Volga Germans, of Russified Bulgarians and Greeks. Nor was it the people who destroyed the workers' right to strike or the peasants' right to sow what they chose. It was not the people who added huge taxes to the price of consumer goods.

The State became the master. The national element moved from the realm of form to the realm of content; it became what was most central and essential, turning the socialist element into a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, an empty shell. Thus was made manifest, with tragic clarity, a sacred law of life: Human freedom stands above everything. There is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom."

--Ivan Grossman, Everything Flows

"Rationality...did not have a monopoly of utterance in 1788 and 1789. The kind of eloquence needed to mobilize popular anger to the point at which it could be used as a lever of power was not cool but hot. And the stokers of revolutionary heat were not prepared to allow it to cool off for the benefit of moderate constitutional change. ...From the beginning revolutionary rhetoric was tuned to a taut pitch of elation and anger. Its tone was visceral rather than cerebral; idealistic rather than realistic; most powerful when it was dividing Frenchmen into Patriots and traitors, most stirring when it was most punitive."

--Simon Schama, Citizens

"The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other."

--David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd

"...Clermont-Tonnerre, as commander of the garrison, was faced with an unenviable decision. It was one that every officer, placed in a similar predicament, throughout the French Revolution--and through countless revolutions to come--would confront. Should he turn his soldiers into the streets to contain, deter or subdue the crowd? If so, should they be fully armed? If so, under what conditions might they fire? Which of these scenarios, if not all of them, might not risk making the situation worse, rather than better? And like many such officers placed in this quandary, he made a half-hearted response, only to find the decision taken out of his hands by the spontaneous brutality of events."

-Simon Schama, Citizens

"And then, all of a sudden, on March 5, 1953, Stalin died. This death was like an invasion; it was a sudden irruption into the vast system of mechanized enthusiasm, of carefully planned popular wrath, of popular love that had been organized in advance by district Party committees.

Stalin's death was not part of any plan; he died without instructions from any higher authority. Stalin died without receiving personal instructions from comrade Stalin himself. In the freedom and capriciousness of death lay something explosive, something hostile to the innermost essence of the Soviet State. Confusion seized minds and hearts.

Stalin had died!..."

--Ivan Grossman, Everything Flows

"High civilization needs seedy poets, artists in garrets, and philosophers who are poor by choice."

--Florence King

"An amiable bachelor here and there doesn't strike me at all amiss, and I think he too may forward the cause of civilization."

--Henry James