My wife Vicki filled a small journal with quotations while at Pitzer in 1964.
***Camus: La Chute (the fall)
Man has two sides: he cannot love without loving himself.
For some people not to take what you don't want is the hardest thing in the world
God is not necessary to create guilt or punish. Our fellows are enough help by themselves.
***
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge was an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not know the things I knew.
***T.S. Eliot: The Cocktail Party
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them… at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
There is certainly no purpose in remaining in the dark except long enough to clear from the mind the illusion of having ever been in the light.
“There’s a loss of personality; Or rather, you’ve lost touch with the person You thought you were. You no longer feel quite human. You’re suddenly reduced to the status of an object — A living object, but no longer a person."
***Thoreau: Walden
I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me but a spectator sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."
***J.D. Salinger
“Oh God,” he confides to his diary, “If I’m anything by a clinical name, I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
“I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).”
***CLAIR HORNER: PLEASE DON’T STEP ON THE BACON
To pass some tests too thoroughly is to fail them. This statement is true, not logical.
Understanding can go only so far… then comes acceptance, for, as in the case of the child, with the kitten, too thorough an investigation can destroy of the object of interest.
I’d rather be unhappy for a reason than happy for none.
Humility is for inferior people.
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Myself, who are here, self-respected be my name (Dumb kings must go)
I will be done here
As it is elsewhere.
Baker, give me this day
What I’ve paid for with my daily bread,
And, anyone, don’t trespass against me,
As I don’t trespass against you.
Lead me into temptation, if you wish, anyone.
But I’ll deliver myself from what my free mind decides is evil.
For mine is my brain, my energy and my ideas, till I rot.
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You can’t get out of an affair more than you put into it, AND you can’t put more into it than the other person is capable of receiving.
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Rain
Cold rain
Wash away this gray day, and die into the night,
And leave me living lonely here in halls of leaden fright.
In leaden halls of tan and gray, of dust webs damp and dry,
Till all is gall and bitter draught
And sleep comes dripping slow.
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Truth
Truth have words on them.
I like the sounds of words
But I love the sound and feel of truth
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Natural marriage: soul mates with universal benefits.
You think, therefore I am.
You think, therefore I am, you think.
It’s a problem to find a place to store yourself when not in use.
I’ll be glad when they perfect space travel, so I can go home.
***George Seferis
If I wished to stay by myself, I desired to find
Solitude, I did not desire such endless waiting.
The scattering of my soul to the horizon,
These lines, these colours, this silence.
There are moments when I have the impression that I have arrived at the goal, that everything is in its proper place, ready to sing together in accord. The machine just on the point of starting. In fact, I can imagine it actually in motion, a living thing, like something astonishingly new. But there is still something else; an infinitesimal impediment, a grain of sand, which grows smaller and smaller, but never so small as to disappear entirely. I do not know what I should say or what I should do…
And I have the unbearable feeling that all the rest of my life will not be enough to dissolve this drop within my soul. And I am haunted by the thought that, if they were to burn me alive, the last part of me to survive would be this insistent moment.
Sartre: Les Mouches
Nobody is waiting for me anywhere. I wander fro city to city, a stranger to all others and to myself, and the cities close again behind me like the waters of a pool.