text:
Charles Mackay (author)

Charles Mackay (27 March 1814 – 24 December 1889) was a Scottish poet, journalist, and song writer.

Quotes

Alas, my friend, the boast is poor; He, who has mingled in the fray Of duty that the brave endure, Must have made foes! If you have none, Small is the work that you have done''', You've hit no traitor on the hip, You've dashed no cup from perjured lip, You've never turned the wrong to right, You've been a coward in the fight.
 * '''You have no enemies, you say?
 * "No Enemies", in Selected Poems and Songs of Charles Mackay (1888), p. 159

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

 * Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds · Full text online at Project Gutenberg

 * Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.

 * Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

 * He who walks through a great city to find subjects for weeping, may, God knows, find plenty at every corner to wring his heart; but let such a man walk on his course, and enjoy his grief alone — we are not of those who would accompany him. The miseries of us poor earthdwellers gain no alleviation from the sympathy of those who merely hunt them out to be pathetic over them. The weeping philosopher too often impairs his eyesight by his woe, and becomes unable from his tears to see the remedies for the evils which he deplores. Thus it will often be found that the man of no tears is the truest philanthropist, as he is the best physician who wears a cheerful face, even in the worst of cases.

 * During seasons of great pestilence, men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was come.
 * Of all the nations in the world the French are the most renowned for singing over their grievances. Of that country it has been remarked with some truth, that its whole history may be traced in its songs.
 * Nations, like individuals, cannot become desperate gamblers with impunity. Punishment is sure to overtake them sooner or later.
 * The intrigues of unworthy courtiers to gain the favour of still more unworthy kings, or the records of murderous battles and sieges, have been dilated on, and told over and over again, with all the eloquence of style and all the charms of fancy; while the circumstances which have most deeply affected the morals and welfare of the people have been passed over with but slight notice, as dry and dull, and capable of neither warmth nor colouring.
 * The over-bearing insolence of ignorant men, who had arisen to sudden wealth by successful gambling, made men of true gentility of mind and manners blush that gold should have power to raise the unworthy in the scale of society.
 * The tulip — so named, it is said, from a Turkish word, signifying a turban — was introduced into western Europe about the middle of the sixteenth century. Conrad Gesner, who claims the merit of having brought it into repute — little dreaming of the commotion it was shortly afterwards to make in the world — says that he first saw it in the year 1559, in a garden at Augsburg, belonging to the learned Counsellor Herwart, a man very famous in his day for his collection of rare exotics. The bulbs were sent to this gentleman by a friend at Constantinople, where the flower had long been a favourite.
 * The demand for tulips of a rare species increased so much in the year 1636, that regular marts for their sale were established on the Stock Exchange of Amsterdam, in Rotterdam, Harlaem, Leyden, Alkmar, Hoorn, and other towns.
 * For more than a thousand years the art of alchymy captivated many noble spirits, and was believed in by millions. Its origin is involved in obscurity. Some of its devotees have claimed for it an antiquity coeval with the creation of man himself, others, again, would trace it no further back than the time of Noah.
 * An epidemic terror of the end of the world has several times spread over the nations. The most remarkable was that which seized Christendom about the middle of the tenth century. Numbers of fanatics appeared in France, Germany, and Italy at that time, preaching that the thousand years prophesied in the Apocalypse as the term of the world’s duration were about to expire, and that the Son of Man would appear in the clouds to judge the godly and the ungodly. The delusion appears to have been discouraged by the Church, but it nevertheless spread rapidly among the people.
 * Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity.
 * The prophecies of Nostradamus consist of upwards of a thousand stanzas, each of four lines, and are to the full as obscure as the oracles of old. They take so great a latitude, both as to time and space, that they are almost sure to be fulfilled somewhere or other in the course of a few centuries.
 * But among all the instances of the interference of governments with men’s hair, the most extraordinary, not only for its daring, but for its success, is that of Peter the Great, in 1705. By this time fashion had condemned the beard in every other country in Europe, and with a voice more potent than popes or emperors, had banished it from civilised society. But this only made the Russians cling more fondly to their ancient ornament, as a mark to distinguish them from foreigners, whom they hated.

Legends of the Isles and Other Poems (1851)

 * Written 1842-1845

 * Cleon hath a million acres,— ne’er a one have I; Cleon dwelleth in a palace, — in a cottage I.
 * "Cleon and I"

The sun’s meridian glow'''; The heel of a priest may tread thee down, And a tyrant work thee woe: But never a truth has been destroyed; They may curse it, and call it crime; Pervert and betray, or slander and slay Its teachers for a time. But the sunshine aye shall light the sky, As round and round we run; And the truth shall ever come uppermost, And justice shall be done.
 * '''They may veil their eyes, but they cannot hide
 * "Eternal Justice", Stanza 4

 * Aid the dawning, tongue and pen; Aid it, hopes of honest men!
 * "Clear the Way"

 * Some love to roam o’er the dark sea’s foam, Where the shrill winds whistle free.
 * "Some Love to Roam"

 * Old Tubal Cain was a man of might In the days when earth was young.
 * "Tubal Cain"

Voices from the Crowd, and Town Lyrics (1857)

 * "What dost thou see, lone watcher on the tower Is the day breaking? comes the wish'd-for hour? Tell us the signs, and stretch abroad thy hand If the bright morning dawns upon the land." "The stars are clear above me, scarcely one Has dimm'd its rays in reverence to the sun; But yet I see, on the horizon's verge, Some fair, faint streaks, as if the light would surge."
 * "The Watcher On The Tower"

 * There’s a good time coming, boys! A good time coming. We may not live to see the day, But earth shall glisten in the ray Of the good time coming. Cannon-balls may aid the truth But thought’s a weapon stronger; We’ll win our battles by its aid, Wait a little longer.
 * "The Good Time Coming"

 * The smallest effort is not lost, Each wavelet on the ocean tost Aids in the ebb-tide or the flow; Each rain-drop makes some floweret blow; Each struggle lessens human woe.
 * "The Old and the New"

The Collected Songs of Charles Mackay (1859)
So can I''': And has enough when he would dine — So have I; He cannot order rain or shine; Nor can I. '''Then, where's the difference — let me see — Betwixt my lord the king and me?'''
 * '''The king can drink the best of wine;
 * "Differences", I

What of that? I sleep on straw and he on down;— What of that? And he's the king and I'm the clown;— What of that? '''If happy I, — and wretched he, — Perhaps the king would change with me!'''
 * I wear the cap and he the crown;—
 * "Differences", V

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title: Charles Mackay (author)


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Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin (1 October 1914 – 28 February 2004) was an American historian, professor, attorney, and author. He served as the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 1969-1973 and was the Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. His book trilogy, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, The National Experience, and The Democratic Experience received the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize. In 1989, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was bestowed upon him.

Quotes

 * Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio —- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how —- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. ... Here at home —- within the family, so to speak —- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.
 * Foreword to America and the image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (1960), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) edited by Robert Andrews, p. 207

 * Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
 * "A Case of Hypochondria", Newsweek (6 July 1970)

 * The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air—so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again, a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.
 * The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), as cited The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) edited by Robert J. Gordon, p. 1

 * The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.
 * The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself (1983), p. 86

 * Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
 * As quoted by Barbara Gamarekian in Working Profile: Daniel J. Boorstin. Helping the Library of Congress Fulfill Its Mission, The New York Times (July 8, 1983)

 * I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
 * As quoted in Wall Street Journal (31 December 1985) on why he did his writing at home very early in the morning while he served as the Librarian of Congress.

 * These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story — a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.
 * The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992) (Vintage edition, 1993, ISBN 0-679-74375-8 ), Preface, p. XV

 * The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
 * Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected (1995). This "aphorism" was expressed in different forms by Josh Billings and Socrates.
 * Often misquoted as, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge," and often misattributed to Stephen Hawking

 * Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
 * As quoted in Book of Humorous Quotations (1998), by Connie Robertson, p. 29

The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)

 * The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, University of Chicago Press (1948; 1993)

 * The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.
 * Introduction, part 2: The Influence of America on the Mind, p. 6

 * While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.
 * Ch. 1, part 2: The Economy of Nature, p. 41

 * While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.
 * Ch. 3, The Physiology of Thought and Morals, Introduction, p. 111

 * The variety of minds served the economy of nature in many ways. The Creator, who designed the human brain for activity, had insured the restlessness of all minds by enabling no single one to envisage all the qualities of the creation. Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude.
 * Ch. 3, Part 2: The Happy Variety of Minds, p. 125

 * Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
 * Ch. 4, Part 1: Natural History and Political Science, p. 178

 * Jeffersonian isolationism expressed an essentially cosmopolitan spirit. The Jeffersonian was determined — even at the expense of separating himself from the rest of the globe, and even though he be charged with provincial selfishness — to preserve America as an uncontaminated laboratory.
 * Ch. 4, part 6: The American Destiny, p. 229

 * Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.
 * Notes, p. 262

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

 * The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961); Vintage editions (1992, 2012) ISBN 0-679-74180-1

 * We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
 * Preface''

 * IN THE last half century a larger and larger proportion of our experience, of what we read and see and hear, has come to consist of pseudo‑events. We expect more of them and we are given more of them. They flood our consciousness. Their multiplication has gone on in the United States at a faster rate than elsewhere. Even the rate of increase is increasing every day. This is true of the world of education, of consumption, and of personal relations.
 * p. 12

 * The news leak is a pseudo‑event par excellence. In its origin and growth, the leak illustrates another axiom of the world of pseudo‑events: pseudo‑events produce more pseudo‑events.
 * p. 31

 * Pseudo‑events spawn other pseudo‑events in geometric progression. This is partly because every kind of pseudo-event (being planned) tends to become ritualized, with a protocol and a rigidity all its own. As each type of pseudo-event acquires this rigidity, pressures arise to produce other, derivative, forms of pseudo‑event which are more fluid, more tantalizing, and more interestingly ambiguous.
 * p. 33

 * These pseudo‑events which flood our consciousness must be distinguished from propaganda. The two do have some characteristics in common. But our peculiar problems come from the fact that pseudo‑events are in some respects the opposite of the propaganda which rules totalitarian countries. Propaganda — as prescribed, say, by Hitler in Mein Kampf — is information intentionally biased. Its effect depends primarily on its emotional appeal. While a pseudo‑event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood. Pseudo‑events thrive on our honest desire to be informed, to have “all the facts,” and even to have more facts than there really are.
 * p. 34

 * The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.
 * p. 37

 * In the age of pseudo‑events it is less the artificial simplification than the artificial complication of experience that confuses us. Whenever in the public mind a pseudo‑event competes for attention with a spontaneous event in the same field, the pseudo‑event will tend to dominate. What happens on television will overshadow what happens off television.
 * p. 39

 * Pseudo‑events do, of course, increase our illusion of grasp on the world, what some have called the American illusion of omnipotence. Perhaps, we come to think, the world’s problems can really be settled by “statements,” by “Summit” meetings, by a competition of “prestige,” by overshadowing images, and by political quiz shows.
 * p. 44

 * Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.
 * p. 48

 * A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
 * p. 57

 * The image, more interesting than its original, has become the original. The shadow has become the substance.
 * p. 204

 * By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs.
 * p. 213

 * A sign of a celebrity is often that his name is worth more than his services.
 * p. 220

 * Of all nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.
 * p. 245

 * As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America. has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.
 * p. 257

 * We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.
 * p. 261

The Republic of Technology (1978)

 * The Republic of Technology: Reflections on our Future Community (1978) ISBN 0060104287

 * The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
 * p. 9

 * The American settlers came to take and shape the land. The first occupants of the land — the "Indians" whom the European migrants encountered — would not be treated, in the pattern of the Romans, as people to be incorporated into an empire. Instead, they were treated as part of the landscape. Most of them were simply cleared away, like the forest, or pushed back, like the wilderness.
 * p. 38

Misattributed

 * The cities of Italy are now deluged with droves of these creatures [tour groups], for they never separate, and you see them, forty in number, pouring along a street with their director — now in front, now at the rear, circling them like a sheep dog — and really the process is as like herding as may be.
 * Charles James Lever, Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men and Women and Other Things in General (Blackwood's Magazine, 1864-1865): "Continental Excursionists" [Adamant Media Corporation, 2001, ISBN 0-543-90729-5 ], p. 243. Quoted by Boorstin in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [Vintage edition, 1992, ISBN 0-679-74180-1 ], Ch. 3: From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel, p. 88

title: Daniel J. Boorstin


text:
Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth (19 March 1933 – 22 May 2018) was an American novelist. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his novel American Pastoral. In May 2011, he received the Man Booker International Prize, for achievement in fiction on the world stage, becoming the fourth winner of the biennial award.

Quotes

 * The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
 * As quoted in "Works in Progress" in The New York Times Book Review (15 July 1979), page BR1

 * When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.
 * "A Visit with Philip Roth," interview with James Atlas, The New York Times Book Review (2 September 1979), p. BR1

 * To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver.
 * "The Ghosts of Roth," interview with Alan Finkielkraut, Esquire (September 1981)

 * This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after "Defender of the Faith," again after "Goodbye Columbus," and understandably it went way up — to about 107 — after "Portnoy's Complaint." Now there's just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about.
 * On criticism of his writing, as quoted in "The Unbounded Spirit of Philip Roth", interview with Mervyn Rothstein, The New York Times (1 August 1985), Late City Final Edition, section C, page 13, column 1

 * I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.
 * Deception: A Novel (1990)

 * I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.
 * Deception: A Novel (1990)

 * I'm exactly the opposite of religious, I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie. … I have such a huge dislike. It's not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion. I don't even want to talk about it, it's not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers. When I write, I'm alone. It's filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety — and I never needed religion to save me.
 * Interview by Martin Krasnik The Guardian (14 December 2005)

 * When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it will be a great place.
 * Interview on CBS, 3 October 2010, Philip Roth on Fame, Sex, and God CBS News (3 October 2010)

 * I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.
 * As quoted in "Roth on Trump" by Judith Thurman, in The New Yorker (30 January 2017), p. 17

 * No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as "the worship of jackals by jackasses") could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon. How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times! How quaint! But then what could I know in 1960 of 1963 or 1968 or 1974 or 2001 or 2016? … However prescient The Plot Against America might seem to you, there is surely one enormous difference between the political circumstances I invent there for the U.S. in 1940 and the political calamity that dismays us so today. It’s the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. … Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.
 * Comparing Charles Lindbergh's leadership of an "America First" movement with that of Donald Trump, in responses to being asked about foreseeing an America such as now exists in his earlier writings, including his alternate-history novel The Plot Against America (2004) where Lindbergh defeated FDR for the presidency in 1940, as quoted in "No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say" by Charles Mcgrath, in The New York Times (16 January 2018)

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

 * Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!

 * [H]er breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them.
 * Chapter 2

 * We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them — at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away. So we moved back and forth from chairs to water, from talk to silence, and considering my unshakable edginess with Brenda, and the high walls of ego that rose, buttresses and all, between her and her knowledge of herself, we managed pretty well.
 * Chapter 2

 * Life was a throwing off for poor aunt Gladys, her greatest joys were taking out the garbage, emptying the pantry, and making threadbare bundles for what she still refers to as the poor Jews of Palestine.

Writing About Jews (1963)

 * "Writing about Jews", Commentary magazine (December 1963)

 * Ever Since some of my first stories were published in 1959 in a volume called Goodbye, Columbus, my work has been attacked from certain pulpits and in certain periodicals as dangerous, dishonest, and irresponsible. I have read editorials and articles in Jewish community newspapers condemning these stories for ignoring the accomplishments of Jewish life, or, as Rabbi Emanuel Rackman recently told a convention of the Rabbinical Council of America, for creating a "distorted image of the basic values of Orthodox Judaism," and even, he went on, for denying the non-Jewish world the opportunity of appreciating "the overwhelming contributions which Orthodox Jews are making in every avenue of modern endeavor …"

 * I do not write a story to make evident whatever disapproval I may feel for adulterous men. I write a story of a man who is adulterous to reveal the condition of such a man. If the adulterous man is a Jew, then I am revealing the condition of an adulterous man who is a Jew. Why tell that story? Because I seem to be interested in how — and why and when — a man acts counter to what he considers to be his "best self," or what others assume it to be, or would like for it to be. The subject is hardly "mine"; it interested readers and writers for a long time before it became my turn to be engaged by it, too.

 * Literary works do not take as their subjects characters and events which have impressed a writer primarily by the frequency of their appearance. For example, how many Jewish men, as we know them, have come nearly to the brink of plunging a knife into their only son because they believed God had commanded them to? The story of Abraham and Isaac derives its meaning from something other than its being a familiar, recognizable, everyday occurrence. The test of any literary work is not how broad is its range of representation — for all that breadth may be characteristic of a kind of narrative — but the depth with which the writer reveals whatever it may be that he has chosen to represent.

 * The concerns of fiction, let it be said, are not those of a statistician — or of a public-relations firm. The novelist asks himself, "What do people think?"; the PR man asks, "What will people think?"

 * All the tolerance of persecution that has seeped into the Jewish character — the adaptability, the patience, the resignation, the silence, the self-denial — must be squeezed out, until the only response there is to any restriction of liberties is "No, I refuse."

 * The chances are that there will always be some people who will despise Jews, just so long as they continue to call themselves Jews; and, of course, we must keep an eye on them. But if some Jews are dreaming of a time when they will be accepted by Christians as Christians accept one another — if this is why certain Jewish writers should be silent — it may be that they are dreaming of a time that cannot be, and of a condition that does not exist, this side of one’s dreams. Perhaps even the Christians don’t accept one another as they are imagined to in that world from which Jews may believe themselves excluded solely because they are Jews.

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

 * A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

 * It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, "Momma, do we believe in winter?"

 * My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets — no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!
 * Ch. 4: "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life"

 * Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles — and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech — look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.
 * Part 5: "Cunt Crazy"

 * I am thirteen. At long last, not a cored apple. Not an empty milk bottle greased with vaseline, but a girl in a slip, with two tits and a cunt — and a mustache, but who am I to be picky.

 * I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.

 * ...and then this amazing creature — to whom no one has ever said "Shah!" or "I only hope your children will do the same to you someday!"

 * I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

 * American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property — on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.

 * Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them — because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!

 * I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nose? "You seem like a very nice person Mr. Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?" Because suddenly it has taken off, the middle of my face! Because gone is the button of my childhood years, that pretty little thing that people used to look at in my carriage, and lo and behold, the middle of my face has begun to reach out towards God. Porte-Noir and Parsons my ass, kid, you have got J-E-W written right across the middle of your face.

The Counterlife (1986)

 * Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body, but then maybe that’s what the Jews had in mind and what makes the act seem quintessentially Jewish and the mark of their reality. Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in — also that you’re mine and not theirs.... Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living "naturally," unencumbered by man-made ritual. To be born is to lose all that. The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own.
 * Ch. 5

 * England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
 * Ch. 5

 * Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
 * Ch. 5

 * All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self .... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required .... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.
 * Ch. 5

Paris Review Interview (1986)

 * Interview with Hermione Lee (summer 1983 - winter 1984), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, seventh series, Viking/Penguin, 1986, ISBN 0-140-08500-9

 * Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it — that's what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning, start there; that's the first paragraph of the book. I'll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I'll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn't come to more than one page, but if I'm lucky, that's the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.

 * I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don't need that question answered.

 * You know, the dirty little secret is no longer sex; the dirty little secret is hatred and rage. It's the tirade that's taboo. Odd that this should be so a hundred years after Dostoyevsky (and fifty after Freud), but nobody nice likes to be identified with the stuff. It's the way folks used to feel about fellatio in the good old days. "Me? Never heard of it. Disgusting." But is it "hostile," really, to take a look at the ferocity of the emotion they call "hostility"?

 * Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.

 * I was trying to solve the problem of this book. (My Life as a Man) When it seemed I never would, I stopped and wrote Our Gang; when I tried again and still couldn't write it, I stopped and wrote the baseball book; then while finishing the baseball book, I stopped to write The Breast. It was as though I were blasting my way through a tunnel to reach the novel I couldn't write. Each of one's books is a blast, clearing the way for what's next.

 * When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction.

 * You ask if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction.

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

 * Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
 * Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman

 * Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
 * Referring to the life of a fiction writer, in the opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman.

 * Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
 * Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman

 * It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
 * Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman

 * You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that — all those protestations notwithstanding — your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead — self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance — and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health — may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?
 * Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth

 * They boo you, they whistle, they stamp their feet — you hate it but you thrive on it. Because the things that wear you down are the things that nurture you and your talent.
 * Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth

(1995)

 * Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime — the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April — name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother — in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother... and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning...Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.

 * Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else...What large thought Sabbath was struggling to express? Is he asking, "Whatever did happen to my own true life?" Was it taking place elsewhere? But how then can looking out of this window be so gigantically real? Well, that is the difference between the true and the real. We don't get to live in the truth. That's why Nikki ran away. She was an idealist, an innocent, touching, talented illusionist who wanted to live in the truth. Well, if you found it, kid, you're the first. In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence — precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.

 * And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

(2000)

 * There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

The Dying Animal (2001)

 * ""You'll always be powerless to this girl. You'll never be in charge. There's something there," George told me, "that makes you crazy and always will. If you don't cut the connection for good, in the end that something will destroy you. You're no longer merely answering natural need with her. This is the pathology in its purest form. Look," he told me, "see it as a critic, see it from a professional point of view. You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl — you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment. Do you know when that happened? … I'm not against it because it's disgusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open."

 * Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.

 * The jealously. That poison. And unprovoked. Jealous even when she tells me she's going ice-skating with her eighteen-year-old brother.

 * You too need the lecture on the childishness of coupling? Of course it's childish. Family life is, today more than ever, when the ethos is created substantially by the children. It's even worse when there are no children around. Because the childish adult replaces the child. Coupled life and family life bring out everything that's childish in everyone involved. Why do they have to sleep night after night in the same bed? Why must they be on the phone to each other five times a day? Why are they always with each other? The forced deference is certainly childish. The unnatural deference.

 * Now, I'm very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody's defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else. They come to my first class, and I know almost immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to him when he's hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, "You are my meat, sir." Well, that "sir" is transformed into "young lady" when I see them in class.

 * That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.

The Plot Against America (2004)

 * All quotes are from the trade paperback edition published by Vintage International, ISBN 1-4000-7949-7, September 2005, 1st printing

 * Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
 * Chapter 3, “Following Christians” (pp. 113-114)

 * Monty was the most overbearing of my uncles, which probably accounted for why he was also the richest.
 * Chapter 4, “The Stump” (p. 122)

 * “Because what’s history?” he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. “History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday.”
 * Chapter 5, “Never Before” (p. 180)

 * He tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.
 * Chapter 5, “Never Before” (p. 181)

 * Probably I couldn’t have done any worse—I might well have done a lot better—seeking solace from the two nuns on the Lyons Avenue bus than from someone reveling in the pleasures of the standard, petty corruptions that proliferate wherever people compete for even the tiniest advantages of rank.
 * Chapter 6, “Their Country” (p. 217)

 * There’s a plot afoot all right, and I’ll gladly name the forces propelling it—hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear. What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off.
 * Chapter 8, “Bad Days” (p. 315)

Everyman (2006)

 * Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than he'd been in years?.

 * Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.

 * I'm sure the liars as skillful and persistent and devious as you reach the point where it's the one you are lying to, and not you, who seems like the one with the serious limitations.

 * Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

 * He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

Exit Ghost (2007)

 * In the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a "great communicator" no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide.

 * They [the young] are not "no-longers," losing faculties, losing control, shamefully dispossessed from themselves, marked by deprivation and experiencing the organic rebellion staged by the body against the elderly; they are "not-yets," with no idea how quickly things turn out another way.

Quotes about Roth

 * Sorted alphabetically by author or source

 * What is being done to silence this man? Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.
 * Anonymous (unidentified) rabbi and educator in New York City, in a letter written to the Anti-Defamation League, as quoted in "Writing about Jews" by Philip Roth, Commentary magazine (December 1963)

 * Toni Morrison, Kay Boyle, Philip Roth, Peter Matthiessen, Anne Tyler, and Rosellen Brown read an unknown manuscript and responded with those quotes and marks of approval that appear on book jackets. These were completely unsolicited and I still find it remarkable that these writers, overwhelmed with pleas and manuscripts, picked up Love Medicine and responded. There were a great number of people kind along the way. One hears much more about the egomania and posturing of writers than one does about the devotion that writers have for one another's work.
 * 1993 interview in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (1994)

 * Saul Bellow and Philip Roth made the words Jewish and manic synonymous. "What are we doing? What are we doing?" their novels scream at us, from Augie March on.
 * Vivian Gornick Introduction to The Jewish Publication Society's 1987 edition of Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946)

 * Roth’s three favorite topics — Jews, women and New Jersey — all remain socially acceptable targets of irrational public mockery, and Roth was a virtuoso at mocking the combination of all three...His strength lay in those brilliantly rendered characters and voices like his. His weakness was that those voices denigrated just about everyone else. His caricatured women are merely a symptom of this lack of curiosity: It shows up again in Roth’s religious characters, his Israeli characters, his non-Jewish characters, his anyone-who-isn’t-him characters. That’s why Brenda and the many other Jewish New Jersey women in his books, ostensibly so close to home, struck me as so unfamiliar. I didn’t know these women at all, because neither did he...What endures, sadly, is Roth’s lack of imagination, the unempathetic and incurious caricaturing of others that he turned into a virtue — and which now defines much of American public life.
 * Dara Horn "What Philip Roth Didn’t Know About Women Could Fill a Book" (May 25, 2018)

 * The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice.
 * Irving Howe, as quoted in "The War between Writers and Reviewers" by Thomas Fleming, in The New York Times (6 January 1985); originally in Howe's "Philip Roth Reconsidered," Commentary, Vol. 54 (December 1972)

 * In high school, I'd devoured the works of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer, moved by stories of men trying to find their place in an America that didn't welcome them.
 * Barack Obama A Promised Land (2020)

 * I'm a woman and that makes a big difference. It separates me a lot from Bellow and Roth and all those guys. There's such distortion in their writing sometimes, the kind of stuff that gives men a bad name. It really louses them up. I think there's a lot of contempt for their fathers coming out and it doesn't do the books, or them, a lot of good.
 * 1985 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)

 * He's a fine writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him.
 * Jacqueline Susann, as quoted in Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann (1996) by Barbara Seaman

 * as Freud's views on the childhood source of mental disorder have permeated our culture, there has been mounted a wide campaign of mother-suspicion and mother-discreditation. From Sidney Howard's play The Silver Cord, in the mid-twenties, to Philip Roth's more recent Portnoy's Complaint, our literature has disseminated the idea that American women alternate a diet of husbands with a diet of sons.
 * Diana Trilling "Women's Liberation" in We Must March My Darlings (1977)

title: Philip Roth


text:
Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (born 30 April 1945) is an American author born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her non-fiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974. She has since published ten other books. Her most recent is the novel The Maytrees (June 2007).

Quotes

 * Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.
 * "The Force That Drives the Flower", The Atlantic, Nov. 1973
 * This view requires that a monstrous world running on chance and death, careening blindly from nowhere to nowhere, somehow produced wonderful us. I came from the world, I crawled out of a sea of amino acids, and now I must whirl around and shake my fist at that sea, and cry Shame! If I value anything at all, then I must blindfold my eyes when I near the randomly shaped Swiss Alps. We must as a culture disassemble our telescopes and settle down to backslapping. We little blobs of soft tissue crawling around on this one planet's skin are right, and the whole universe is wrong.
 * "The Force That Drives the Flower", The Atlantic, Nov. 1973
 * There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
 * Holy the Firm (1977)
 * The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.
 * "Expedition to the Pole", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)
 * On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
 * "An Expedition to the Pole", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

 * Whenever a work's structure is intentionally one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.
 * Quoted by Ted Nelson in Literary Machines (1982)

 * Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
 * An American Childhood (1987)

 * How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
 * The Writing Life (1989)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1976)
New York: HarperCollins. 2007. ISBN 978-0061493065.

 * [M]any carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can't flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs. People have seen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldn't close them. Ants don't even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite.
 * "Heaven and Earth in Jest", p. 9
 * After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
 * "Heaven and Earth in Jest", p. 11
 * The egg of a parasite chalcid wasp, a common small wasp, multiplies unassisted, making ever more identical eggs. The female lays a single fertilized egg in the flaccid tissues of its live prey, and that one egg divides and divides. As many as two thousand new parasitic wasps will hatch to feed on the host's body with identical hunger. Similarly—only more so—Edwin Way Teale reports that a lone aphid, without a partner, breeding "unmolested" for one year, would produce so many living aphids that, although they are only a tenth of an inch long, together they would extend into space twenty-five hundred light-years. Even the average goldfish lays five thousand eggs, which she will eat as fast as the lays, if permitted. The sales manager of Ozark Fisheries in Missouri, which raises commercial goldfish for the likes of me, said, "We produce, measure, and sell our product by the ton." The intricacy of Ellery and aphids multiplied mindlessly into tons and light-years is more than extravagance; it is holocaust, parody, glut.
 * "Fecundity", pp. 169–170
 * Even such sophisticated mammals as the great predator cats occasionally eat their cubs. A mother cat will be observed licking the area around the umbilical cord of the helpless newborn. She licks, she licks, she licks until something snaps in her brain, and she begins eating, starting there, at the vulnerable belly.
 * "Fecundity", p. 171
 * You are an ichneumon. You mated and your eggs are fertile. If you can't find a caterpillar on which to lay your eggs, your young will starve. When the eggs hatch, the young will eat any body in which they find themselves, so if you don't kill them by emitting them broadcast over the landscape, they'll eat you alive. But if you let them drop over the fields you will probably be dead yourself, of old age, before they even hatch to starve, and the whole show will be over and done, and a wretched one it was. You feel them coming, and coming, and you struggle to rise….
 * "Fecundity", p. 172
 * Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe. The words are simple, the concept clear—but you don't believe it, do you? Nor do I. How could I, when we're both so lovable? Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? This is the key point.
 * "Fecundity", p. 178
 * [T]he world is a monster. Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world who behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.
 * "Fecundity", p. 179
 * For most creatures, being parasitized is a way of life—if you call that living.
 * "The Horns of the Altar", p. 231
 * I think of the fox that Park Service Ranger Gene Parker told me about. The fox sprawled naked and pink-skinned in a mountain field, unable to rise, dying of mange. I think of the swimming bluegill I saw at the Lawsons', upstream in Tinker Creek on the other side of Tinker Mountain. One of its eyes was blinded by an overgrowth of white water mold, a white that spread halfway down its back in filmy lumps like soaked cotton batting. It had been injured, perhaps when a fisherman had hooked it and tossed it back, perhaps when a flood dashed it on rocks, and the fungus had spread from the injured site. I think of Loren Eiseley's description of a scientist he met in the field, who was gleefully bearing a bloody jar squirming with yard after yard of some unthinkable parasite he had just found in the belly of a rabbit. Suddenly the lives of the parasites—some sort of hellish hagiography—come to mind. I remember the bloodworms and flukes, whose parasitic life cycles require the living bodies of as many as four hosts. How many of the grasshoppers that hurtled around me in the Lucas meadow bore inside their guts the immense coiled larvae of horsehair worms?
 * "The Horns of the Altar", pp. 231–232
 * In another book I learn that ten percent of all the world's species are parasitic insects. It is hard to believe. What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harassing, disfiguring, or totally destroying the other ninety percent? These things are not well enough known.
 * "The Horns of the Altar", p. 232
 * Let me repeat that these parasitic insects comprise ten percent of all known animal species. How can this be understood? Certainly we give our infants the wrong idea about their fellow creatures in the world. Teddy bears should come with tiny stuffed bearlice; ten percent of all baby bibs and rattles sold should be adorned with colorful blowflies, maggots, and screw-worms. What kind of devil's tithe do we pay? What percentage of the world's species that are not insects are parasitic? Could it be, counting bacteria and viruses, that we live in a world in which half the creatures are running from—or limping from—the other half?
 * "The Horns of the Altar", p. 236
 * Outright predators, of course, I understand. I am among them. There is no denying that the feats of predators can be just as gruesome as those of the unlovely parasites: the swathing and sipping of trapped hummingbirds by barn spiders, the occasional killing and eating of monkeys by chimpanzees. If I were to eat as the delicate ladybug eats, I would go through in just nine days the entire population of Boys Town. Nevertheless, the most rapacious lurk and charge of any predator is not nearly so sinister as the silent hatching of barely visible, implanted eggs. With predators, at least you have a chance.
 * "The Horns of the Altar", pp. 237–238
 * I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply, "Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love."
 * "The Horns of the Altar", p. 245
 * I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loose; I walk on my way.
 * "The Horns of the Altar", p. 246
 * Each of these butterflies, the fruit of two or three broods of this summer, had hatched successfully from one of those emerald cases that Teale's caterpillar had been about to form when the parasitic larvae snapped it limp, eating their way out of its side. They had hatched, many of them, just before a thunderstorm, when winds lifted the silver leaves of trees and birds sought the shelter of shrubbery, uttering cries.
 * "Nothing", p. 256

title: Annie Dillard


text:
Talk:Prem Rawat

Talk:Prem Rawat/archive_1 Talk:Prem Rawat/archive_2

Category
The categorization of Prem Rawat as Category:Religious leaders has been removed by anons two anons. As PR is classified in wikipedia as a leader of a "New Religious Movement", it is obvious that he is a religious leader. If you have a different opinion on this, please comment here, do not revert. If another removal will happen, I'll add back the category, put an npov dispute tag, protect the page and see where the consensus is. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 06:08, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

 * Since it has been a long time since my warning here, an anon removed the category again without any discussion beyond an edit summary saying "not a religion, not a leader". If anyone wants to dispute categorization, do it via talk, not via misleading edit summaries. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 21:07, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Cleanup
Shalom, Moshe. Can you explain why did you add a tag to this article? Each quote is properly refereced, the chronology is good, etc. Thanks.~ jossi fresco ~ 21:46, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

 * There is really no need to use foreign words when talking to me -- I am quite fluent with English, thanks.
 * I've added the cleanup tag because the sources and quotations are not in standard format (quotation as bullet, sans quotation marks, source as subbullets), there is no "sourced" section, the introduction is not composed of proper sentences, the "Other quotes" section is misnamed and miscapitalized, and because the "wikipedia articles" section, other than being miscapitalized should be titled "external links" and contain the wikipedia box like other articles do. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 15:56, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Moshe, Jossi is Prem Rawat's web master and has been very active promoting him on the web and censoring embarrassing factual information about Rawat on Wikipedia. For example, he does not want there to be verbatim quotes of Rawat that clearly show that Rawat has repeatedly claimed to be the Lord incarnate. Some former followers (sometimes referred to as 'ex-premies') have struggled to get the truth out about Rawat and have been thwarted by this censorship. Jossi even claims that a favorable view of Rawat is the majority view! 69.251.176.184 02:39, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

 * BTW, there is a policy for adding a comment as above when placing a cleanup tag. See en:Wikipedia:Cleanup as linked from the cleanup template. As for the standard format, I will need to research what that means as you did not provide a link so I can learn these. I am an admin and an experienced editor at wikipedia and I am not familiar with Wikiquite formatting rules. ~ jossi fresco ~ 23:16, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

 * The policy above is a wikipedia policy. There is no similar wikiquote policy. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 03:57, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Then you need to fix the cleanup template as it links to en:WP policy page. 66.92.51.106 00:04, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Cleanup tage removed. I have made all the necessary changes according to the manual of style. ~ jossi fresco ~ 19:47, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Where is the evidence that Rawat was "addressing diplomats" in the picture of him at the UN? I understand that, to the contrary, his organization merely rented the room. --24.69.14.159 03:39, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

 * See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Image:Maharaji_United_Nations_Anniversary.jpg. The photo is from the one of the events celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the United Nations, held in San Francisco . --Terryp 04:26, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
 * The photo does not show that he was "addressing diplomats". Just because there was a UN emblem does not imply there were diplomats in the audience. 69.251.176.184 02:39, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Who decides whether a source is disreputable or not?
Jossi - precisely what, pray tell, is disreputable about that site which quoted a Doordarshan television interview with Prem Rawat? Perhaps you could have the decency to state whatever reasons you might have for doubting its authenticity before you go deleting at will - and for no apparent purpose, other than you're embarrassed by what Rawat is reported (by one of his own "students", I hasten to add) to have said?

For reference, here it is again: Taped interview with Prem Rawat, by Rajiv Mehrotra on Doordarshan television in India, 3 March 2006:
 * Q (Mehrotra):  "What would you say to Bin Laden and George Bush?"?
 * A: (Rawat): "I have to look at them as human beings.
 * If it was morning I would say "good morning."
 * I would say, "have a good life.""
 * source - http://innerlink.typepad.com/india/2006/03/maharaji_on_tv_.html#

Revera 12:43, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

 * Here's what's posted at the site Jossi doubts the authenticy of:

 * QUOTE
 * About the Innerlink Blog

 * Hello
 * It is incredible for me to see so much excitement in response to this blog. Thank you Maharaji, for giving us
 * something worth writing about.

 * I am only part of the small team that is making this happen. Sushi Davies is doing some of the writing and editing plus the
 * web and email work (which is a lot). Mehau Kulyk is taking many of the photos and other members of the production crew
 * are providing support on the road. Dunrite is providing the server infrastructure, with some initial help from Visions. With
 * all that said, the blogs are the effort of a small group of volunteers, written from our individual perspectives and
 * experiences.
 * They do not represent any company or organization.

 * ENDQUOTE

 * I am not "doubting the authenticity" of this blog (why should I?). This is a personal blog, of a group of volunteers, and may not be the best source for that quote. I have asked for the transcript from Doordarshan so that the quote, and others from that interview, can be properly sourced and attributed. I would call this "due dilligence". ~ jossi fresco ~ 01:07, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

 * To keep you at ease, I will restore the quote, after fixing the format and removing your signature from it. ~ jossi fresco ~ 01:09, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

 * That's a very odd position you're taking Jossi. On one hand you say you're "not doubting the authenticity" of the blog, yet on the other you deleted the quote on the following premise: "Blog not a verifiable source. Rv:"

 * I see you've changed your mind and reinstated the quote.  Will this "keep me at my ease?".  Let's just agree that your attempts at censoring your "Master" will never let the likes of you, as one of Rawat's spin doctors, be free from the attentions/observations of those of us who want the truth about him - and his past - to be available to all.  He IS a public figure, after all ...  20:44, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

 * I did not censor anything, I removed a cite from a blog that is not an accepted source for material in WP. You may have read too many books on consipracy theories (LOL!). Spare me the rethoric, Thank you. ~ jossi fresco ~ 01:34, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

 * I must apologise for my naivety. Of course, only conspiracy nuts would ever entertain the possibility that you, Prem Rawat's webmaster, might have anything other than a neutral point of view in your editing. (LOL too!)

 * Incidentally, I've just looked up the OCD (Oxford Concise) dictionary definition of the word "censor" - wondering if the word in any way differed from the verb to "remove") and it really was quite an education. In fact, since it's not the easiest reference work to access online, I hope you don't mind if I give the definition here:
 *  censor
 * 1. Ancient-Roman magistrate drawing up register or census of citizens and supervising public morals; person expressing opinions on others' morals and conduct.
 * 2. Official licensing, or suppressing as immoral, seditious, or inopportune, books, plays, letters, news, or military intelligence (vb - exercise such control over, make excisions or changes in).
 * 3. Various university officials.
 * 4. (psycho-anal.) ~(ship), a power by which elements of the Unconscious are inhibited from emerging into the consciousness.
 * Revera 13:40, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
 * FYI, the content policy of NPOV applies only to Wikipedia, not to Wikiquote, as in here we are only reporting quotes made by notable people and not opinions or POVs about these. ~ jossi fresco ~ 21:41, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Some thoughts on the content of this page
For those interested, I undertook an analysis of this page and the lessons that can be drawn from it. This is within the larger framework of improving all the pages relating to Prem Rawat and his work in favor of peace for more than 50 years. Below is the introduction to this study, continued on my Wikipedia's user page:

 * “Prem Rawat is someone very simple, in the truest sense of it: he lives and expresses himself in the present moment. When he gets up on stage, maybe he has one or two ideas he wants to talk about, but nothing is really prepared; he speaks from his heart to people in front of him. That’s how he takes them on a journey. This is not a usual lecture; words are only one aspect of the experience to which he invites us.
 * That’s why quoting him is difficult. A quote should be a whole in itself. It should represent a moment, synthesize a concept, represent a thought.
 * I went through the hundred quotes currently posted on Wikiquote, and I ended up with the same problem that exists for almost all pages about PR: remnants of an edit war which has just stopped for lack of fighters, most of the contributors having been banned, from what I understand. Most of the quotes are not really quotes, just passages from his speeches that opponents have used to put forward a particular point of view. And nothing has changed for 13 or 14 years, this for a living person, I underline, who continues to speak a lot, continues to evolve in his art of expressing the indescribable. He even wrote two books!
 * So, I will comment on a few quotes and add a few more. This will perhaps give an idea of what it would be possible to do, if the will to rewrite this biography in an honest and intelligent way could interest Wikipedia, in its concern to provide quality and unbiased information…”

Read the full article here.

--Faunus (talk) 01:17, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

title: Talk:Prem Rawat