Arthur M. Schlesinger

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap.

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.

Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman," by which he meant that those at the top of the heap use intellectuals as a scapegoat to distract people from the societal inequities that actually affect their lives: those of wealth and power. Intellectuals are posited as both sinister and powerful, conspiratorially undermining the values of ordinary people.

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.

The Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.

When every ethnic and religious group claims a right to approve or veto anything that is taught in public schools, cultural pluralism becomes ethnocentrism. An evident casualty is the old idea that whatever our ethnic base, we are all Americans together.

Bernard Malamud

There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go--if there are no doors or windows--he walks through a wall.

Where to look if you've lost your mind

We have two lives... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness.

Without heroes we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

N. Scott Momaday

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.

Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.

They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.

Wallace Stegner

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.

Susan Choi

I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.

Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are so anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own. They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has refined itself as the prologue to cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested.

They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.

Thoughts are often false. A feeling's always real. Not true, just real.

Eudora Welty

All serious daring starts from within.

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...

Write about what you don't know about what you know.

We are the breakers of our own hearts.

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

Ernest Becker

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

We are gods with anuses.

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.

To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

Michael Shaara

There's nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.

If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.

Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.

The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing.

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that enormous, unanswerable question.

A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?

I don't really understand it. Never have. The more I think on it the more it horrifies me. How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible?

William Wharton

There's no end to the absurd things people will do trying to make life mean something.

Love is a combination of admiration, respect, and passion. If you have one of those going, that's par for the course. If you have two, you aren't quite world class but you're close. If you have all three, then you don't need to die; you're already in heaven.

Not many people are interested in what somebody else is thinking, or what they have to say. The best you can hope for is they'll listen to you just so you'll have to listen to them.

People can't fly because they don't believe they can. If nobody ever showed people they could swim, everybody'd drown if they were dropped into the water.

Things come apart much easier than they go together.

Movement is most of what a bird is. When they're dead, they're only feathers and air.

He's convinced most human adults do not know how to play anymore and that playing is one of the best ways to think. Franky finds children, by far, much more pleasant and intelligent than most adults, but they are easily ruined by their families, schools, and society. He says one of the ways they are ruined is by being forced to think of all the tasks that need to be done as work, not as play. It takes the joy out of living.

Robert K. Massie

There would be no Lenin without Rasputin.

The love of power and the power to attract love were not easy to reconcile.

Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.

It is one of the supreme ironies of history that the blessed birth of an only son should have proved the mortal blow. Even as the saluting cannons boomed and the flags waved, Fate had prepared a terrible story. Along with the lost battles and sunken ships, the bombs, the revolutionaries and their plots, the strikes and revolts, Imperial Russia was toppled by a tiny defect in the body of a little boy.

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket.