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Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American naturalist author known for dealing with the gritty reality of life.

Quotes

 * Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash, From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming On the banks of the Wabash, far away.
 * On the Banks of the Wabash (1896), chorus; this song as a whole was written by Dreiser's brother Paul (known as Paul Dresser); but Dreiser stated that "I wrote the first verse and chorus", in A Hoosier Holiday (1916) Ch. XLIII: "The Mystery of Coincidence".

 * I acknowledge the Furies. I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.
 * "The First Voyage Over," The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (August 1913); later published in A Traveler at Forty (1913), ch. I: "Barfleur Takes Me in Hand"

 * If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.
 * The Genius (1915) The University of Illinois Press, 2004, ISBN 0-252-03100-8, p. 734

 * Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
 * "Life, Art and America", in The Seven Arts (February 1917)

 * Liberalism, in the case of the Jew, means internationalism. If you listen to Jews discuss Jews, you will find they are money-minded, very sharp in practice. The Jews lack the fine integrity which at last is endorsed, and to a certain degree followed, by lawyers of other nationalities. The Jew has been in Germany for a thousand years, and he is still a Jew. He has been in America for all of 200 years, and he has not faded into a pure American by any means — and he will not.
 * Letter to Hutchins Hapgood, The Nation (April 17, 1935). See I Testify Against the Jews by Robert Edward Edmondson, p. 83

 * Shakespeare, I come!
 * Intended last words, as told to H. L. Mencken. "When Dreiser wrote that he had already framed his last words — 'Shakespeare, I come!' — and asked Mencken what his would be, Mencken replied acidly, 'I regret that I have but one rectum to leave to my country.'" - William Manchester, Disturber of the Peace: H. L. Mencken (1951) University of Michigan Press, digitized (28 January 2007), pp. 109-110

Sister Carrie (1900)

 * Online at Project Gutenberg

 * Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life — he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected. We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him perfect guidance. He is becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always prevail against them. As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces. In this intermediate stage he wavers — neither drawn in harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will. He is even as a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other — a creature of incalculable variability. We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle of free-will and instinct shall have been adjusted, when perfect understanding has given the former the power to replace the latter entirely, man will no longer vary. The needle of understanding will yet point steadfast and unwavering to the distant pole of truth.
 * Ch. 8 : Intimations By Winter: An Ambassador Summoned

The Financier (1912)

 * Online text

 * A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such. A real man—a financier—was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led.
 * Ch. VI

 * She had no desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information. Innate sensuousness rarely has. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells in a sense of the impressive and the gorgeous, and rests there. Accuracy is not necessary except in the case of aggressive, acquisitive natures, when it manifests itself in a desire to seize. True controlling sensuousness cannot be manifested in the most active dispositions, nor again in the most accurate.
 * Ch. XIII

 * The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions—none more so than the most capable.
 * Ch. XIII

 * Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought—the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this. She may change—Hell hath no fury, etc.—but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration—namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty.
 * Ch. XXIII

 * Few people have the sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what it means to be a controller of wealth, to have that which releases the sources of social action—its medium of exchange. They want money, but not for money's sake. They want it for what it will buy in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it will control—for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power.
 * Ch. XXV

 * The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation—to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.
 * Ch. XXVI

 * Parents are frequently inclined, because of a time-flattered sense of security, to take their children for granted. Nothing ever has happened, so nothing ever will happen. They see their children every day, and through the eyes of affection; and despite their natural charm and their own strong parental love, the children are apt to become not only commonplaces, but ineffably secure against evil. […] The astonishment of most parents at the sudden accidental revelation of evil in connection with any of their children is almost invariably pathetic. […] But it is possible. Very possible. Decidedly likely. Some, through lack of experience or understanding, or both, grow hard and bitter on the instant. They feel themselves astonishingly abased in the face of notable tenderness and sacrifice. Others collapse before the grave manifestation of the insecurity and uncertainty of life—the mystic chemistry of our being. Still others, taught roughly by life, or endowed with understanding or intuition, or both, see in this the latest manifestation of that incomprehensible chemistry which we call life and personality, and, knowing that it is quite vain to hope to gainsay it, save by greater subtlety, put the best face they can upon the matter and call a truce until they can think. We all know that life is unsolvable—we who think. The remainder imagine a vain thing, and are full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
 * Ch. XXVI

 * The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.
 * Ch. XXX

Quotes about Dreiser

 * Most of the writers with whom I was most impressed were the French and Russian writers of another period. The one American writer who stood out to me was Richard Wright-and Dreiser. I took to their naturalism. I was able to understand so much of the country through them.
 * Rosa Guy in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

 * Writers in the twenties reacted not only to the shock of the First World War but to the values held dear in the nineteenth century. The stock responses of good will and progressive enlightenment as an explanation of human behavior had failed Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson even before the First World War. The new attitudes were expressed not only in the realm of ideas but were implicit in the texture of the work, its language, its style, even in what came to be tagged "lack of style."
 * Josephine Herbst "The Ruins of Memory" (April 4, 1956) in The Nation

 * Meridel Le Sueur at fifteen had an introduction to one interpretation of "free love" herself, when attending a salon held by Mabel Dodge, a rich patron of radicals. ("Emma was good at getting rich women to give money.") At Meridel's first salon, "Theodore Dreiser spent the entire evening I was fifteen years old!-chasing me around the library." Meridel had read Dreiser's banned book, Sister Carrie. "He kept saying, don't you know who I am? and I said, yes, I thought you were the greatest author in the country but I didn't know you were a satyr!"
 * quote in "Freethinker Meridel Le Sueur" by Annie Laurie Gaylor (1982)

 * Ever since W. A. Swanberg’s roguish portrait of the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy appeared in 1965, Theodore Dreiser’s reputation as the first great American novelist of the twentieth century and the “father of American realism” has been tarnished, if not obscured, by his reputation as a philanderer. Indeed, Dreiser himself is partly to blame because he was painfully honest in his autobiographies and personal statements; moreover, he sometimes boasted of his success with women. The problem has been further compounded by books written by many of his lovers and the publication of his American Diaries in 1983. The heaviest blow was probably dealt by Yvette Eastman in Dearest Wilding: A Memoir (1995), in which it is revealed that the fifty-eight-year-old Dreiser took the sixteen-year-old future author to bed at his country retreat in Mt. Kisco, New York. Two of the book’s illustrations show the virginal-looking (she had earlier been seduced by Max Eastman) Yvette at age seventeen and a foxy-looking Dreiser in front of one of the log cabins on his Mt. Kisco estate.
 * Jerome Loving,

 * Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens—of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases so brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulfite. Here and there, as in parts of "The Titan" and again in parts of "A Hoosier Holiday," an evil conscience seems to haunt him and he gives hard striving to his manner, and more than once there emerges something that is almost graceful. But a backsliding always follows this phosphoresce of reform.
 * H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces (1917), 2nd edition, pp. 86–87. (1st edition, 1916)

 * Theodore Dreiser Should ought to write nicer.
 * Dorothy Parker, reviewing Dreiser's Dawn in The New Yorker (30 May 1931)

 * Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [Sister Carrie] like an unsavory pit stain.
 * Clementine the Hedgehog, introducing Clementine Classics: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

title: Theodore Dreiser


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Henry James

Henry James, OM (15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916) was an American author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.

 * See also: The American Scene

Quotes

 * [of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones] [it is] like a vast episode in a sermon preached by a grandly humorous divine; and however we may be entertained by the way, we must not forget that our ultimate duty is to be instructed.
 * An early critical review, North American Review (1864)

 * In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
 * "Essays in Criticism by Matthew Arnold," North American Review (July 1865)

 * I haven't a creature to talk to...How in Boston, when the evening arrives, and I am tired of reading, and know it would be better to do something else, can I go to the theater? I have tried it, ad nauseam. Likewise calling. Upon whom?"
 * Letter to William James (between 1866 and 1869)

 * Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
 * Letter to Henry James Sr. (26 October 1869)

 * The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
 * Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (16 January 1871)

 * It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
 * Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (4 February 1872)

 * Deep experience is never peaceful.
 * de Mauves, Galaxy Magazine (February/March 1874), ch. V, reprinted in A Passionate Pilgrim (1875) and later in The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales'' (1879) and the New York Edition of James' works, vol. 13 (1908)

 * Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!
 * The Madonna of the Future (1879)
 * The Atlantic Monthly, March 1873

 * My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life.
 * Notebook entry, Boston, (25 November 1881)

 * There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized.
 * [HTTP://BOOKS.GOOGLE.COM/books?id=FrQRAAAAYAAJ&q=%22there+are+bad+manners+everywhere+but+an+aristocracy+is+bad+manners+organized%22&pg=PA289#v=onepage The Point of View] (1882)

 * I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
 * "Venice," The Century Magazine, vol. XXV (November 1882), reprinted in Portraits of Places (1883) and later in Italian Hours (1909), ch: I: Venice, pt. I

 * Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
 * "Venice," The Century Magazine, vol. XXV (November 1882), reprinted in Portraits of Places (1883) and later in Italian Hours (1909), ch. I: Venice, pt. II

 * There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
 * "Anthony Trollope," Century Magazine (July 1883); reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888)

 * A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
 * "Robert Louis Stevenson," Century Magazine (April 1888)

 * If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid?  Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
 * "The Journal of the Brothers de Goncourt," Fortnightly Review (October 1888)

 * To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live.
 * Notebook entry, London (12 May 1889)

 * The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
 * The Tragic Muse (1890), ch. IX

 * The practice of "reviewing"… in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.
 * Criticism (1893)

 * The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.
 * Criticism

 * However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.
 * Flaubert (1893)

 * We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
 * The Middle Years (1893)

 * She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
 * "Greville Fane", from The Real Thing: and Other Tales (1893)

 * Print it as it stands — beautifully.
 * The Death of the Lion (1894)

 * The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?
 * "The Next Time," The Yellow Book, vol. VI (July 1895)

 * The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
 * Theatricals: Second Series (1895)

 * Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.
 * The Figure in the Carpet (1896)

 * He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
 * "Nathaniel Hawthorne" in Library of the World's Best Literature, vol. XII (1897), ed. Charles Dudley Warner

 * I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
 * Letter to Miss M. Betham Edwards (5 January 1912)

 * We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.
 * Letter to Hugh Walpole (21 August 1913)

 * I still, in presence of life... have reactions — as many as possible... It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions — appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing — and I do. I believe I shall do yet again — it is still an act of life.
 * Letter to Henry Adams (21 March 1914)

 * The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.
 * The New Novel (1914)

 * It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
 * Letter to H.G. Wells (10 July 1915)

 * The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.
 * The Middle Years (1917), ch. VI

 * If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
 * Said to Hamlin Garland in 1906 and quoted by Garland in Roadside Meetings (1930; reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-417-90788-6, ch. XXXVI: Henry James at Rye, p. 461

 * Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
 * Quoted by Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934), ch. 10

 * So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!
 * After suffering a stroke (1915-12-02), the first of several which led to his death, as recounted by Edith Wharton in A Backward Glance (1934), ch. 14: "He is said to have told his old friend Lady Prothero, when she saw him after the first stroke, that in the very act of falling (he was dressing at the time) he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying: 'So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!'"

 * Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind.  And the third is to be kind.
 * Overheard by his nephew, Billy James, in 1902; quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, vol V: The Master 1901-1916 (1972)

Roderick Hudson (1875)

 * Cecilia had moreover a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
 * Ch. I

 * True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
 * Ch. I

 * The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one's ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room and take boarders.
 * Ch. V

 * We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted.
 * Ch. VI

Confidence (1879)

 * It is nothing against the validity of a friendship that the parties to it have not a mutual resemblance. There must be a basis of agreement, but the structure reared upon it may contain a thousand disparities.
 * Ch. II

 * "I know, of course, nothing about vice, but I have known virtue when it was very tiresome." "Ah, then it was a poor affair. It was poor virtue. The best virtue is never tiresome." Miss Vivian looked at him a little, with her fine discriminating eye. "What a dreadful thing to have to think any virtue poor!"
 * Angela Vivian and Bernard Longueville in Ch. V

 * In every disadvantage that a woman suffers at the hands of a man, there is inevitably, in what concerns the man, an element of cowardice. When I say "inevitably," I mean that this is what the woman sees in it.
 * Ch. XIX

Hawthorne (1879)

 * It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
 * Ch. I: The Early Years.
 * One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
 * Ch. II: Early Manhood

 * Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial — he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.
 * Ch. IV: Brook Farm and Concord

 * He would agree that life is a little worth living — or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.
 * Ch. V: The Three American Novels

 * It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.
 * Ch. VI: England and Italy

Washington Square (1881)

 * Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
 * Ch. XIV

 * She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause.
 * Ch. XV

 * Don't undervalue irony; it is often of great use.
 * Ch. XXVII

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

 * Mrs Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband's house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.
 * Ch. III

 * Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett.
 * Ch. VI

 * She had promised him she would consider his question [of marrying him] [...]. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself.
 * Ch. XII

 * There's no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding.
 * Ch. XV

 * "If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. [...] You know that what you ask is impossible [...] I'm capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more strongly."
 * Ch. XVI

 * Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.
 * Ch. XVI

 * She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case – it had not seemed to her in other cases – that the actual completely expressed.
 * Ch. XIX

 * "I don't pretend to know what people are meant for," said Madame Merle. "I only know what I can do with them."
 * Ch. XXII

 * To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake.
 * Ch. XXIII

 * Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
 * Ch. XXIII

 * The working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural.
 * Ch. XXIX

 * She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.
 * Ch. XXXVIII

 * She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To "do" – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.
 * Ch. XLI

 * The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.
 * Ch. XLII

 * You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!
 * Ch. LIV

 * Here she drew forth a small pocket-book, took from it a card and a pencil and, after meditating a moment, wrote a few words. It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query: [...].
 * XLIV

 * What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.
 * Ch. LI

The Art of Fiction (1884)
Originally published in Longman's Magazine (1884-09-04) and reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888)

 * The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
 * Variant text: The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.

 * The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

 * The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

 * Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

 * The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"

 * What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

 * We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple — to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things.

 * There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason.

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

 * The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be.
 * Introduction

 * ...I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and fairy tales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!
 * Ch. I

 * I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I - well, I had them.
 * Ch. II

 * It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other — for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended— the doors we had indiscreetly opened.
 * Ch. XIII

 * The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance — all strewn with crumpled playbills.
 * Ch. XIII

 * Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, all the nature.
 * Ch. XXII

 * He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come.
 * Ch. XXIII

 * It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead.
 * Ch. XXIV

 * I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?
 * Ch. XXIV

 * With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
 * Ch. XXIV

The Awkward Age (1899)

 * I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It is a plant that takes times and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash," as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.
 * Said by Vanderbank in Book I, ch. II

 * Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.
 * Said by the Duchess in Book V, ch. XIX

 * People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
 * Said by Mrs. Brookenham in Book VI, ch. III

The Ambassadors (1903)

 * Live all you can — it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?[…] What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.[…] The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.[…] Live!
 * Book V, ch. II

 * [T]here are women who are for all your "times of life." They're the most wonderful sort.
 * Book V, ch. III

 * When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them.
 * Book VI, ch. III

 * She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
 * Book VII, ch. I

 * [S]he had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned there, in her cave of treasures, like a lamp in a Byzantine vault.
 * Book IX, ch. II

Prefaces (1907-1909)

 * Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
 * Roderick Hudson

 * There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth... than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.
 * The Portrait of a Lady

 * To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of.
 * The Portrait of a Lady

 * Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.
 * The Spoils of Poynton

 * The fatal futility of Fact.
 * The Spoils of Poynton

 * No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.
 * What Maisie Knew

 * The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
 * What Maisie Knew

 * To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
 * What Maisie Knew

 * The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
 * The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces

 * We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
 * The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces

 * The ever importunate murmur, "Dramatize it, dramatize it!"
 * The Altar of the Dead

 * In art economy is always beauty.
 * The Altar of the Dead

 * The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.
 * The Ambassadors

Notes of a Son and Brother (1914)

 * the fraternising, endlessly conversing group of us...under the rustling pines....[talked of] a hundred human and personal things....[It was] high talk [in the] splendid American summer drawn out to its last generosity....[the talkers constituted] a little world of easy and happy interchange, of unrestricted and yet all so instructively sane and secure association and conversation, with all its liberties and delicacies, all its mirth and earnestness.
 * From an account James gave of a trip he, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and future Harvard Law professor John Chipman Gray took to the White Mountains in August 1865, as quoted in Leon Edel's Henry James: The Untried Years: 1843-1870, p. 231.

Misattributed

 * Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
 * William James, "Is Life Worth Living?," The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

 * Ideas are, in truth, force.
 * "Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history." — Henry James (1879-1947), Charles W. Eliot (1930), 2 vol. This namesake was James' nephew, the son of William James. His life of Eliot earned him the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

 * Life's too short for chess.
 * Henry James Byron, Our Boys (1875), Act I

Quotes about James

 * It's not that he "bites off more than he can chaw," as T. G. Appleton said of Nathan, but he chaws more than he bites off.
 * Clover Adams, letter to her father (December 1881), in The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, ed. Ward Thoron (1936)

 * The book was very hard to write because I was too young when I started, seventeen; it was really about me and my father. There were things I couldn't deal with technically at first. Most of all, I couldn't deal with me. This is where reading Henry James helped me, with his whole idea about the center of consciousness and using a single intelligence to tell the story. He gave me the idea to make the novel happen on John's birthday…The first person is the most terrifying view of all. I tend to be in accord with James, who hated the first person perspective, which the reader has no reason to trust-why should you need this I? How is this person real by dint of that bar blaring across the page?
 * 1984 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

 * (What's the difference between a spokesman and a witness?) A spokesman assumes that he is speaking for others. I never assumed that I never assumed that I could. Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, could speak very eloquently for herself. What I tried to do, or to interpret and make clear was that what the Republic was doing to that woman, it was also doing to itself. No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society. (Are there any white writers you would describe as witnesses?) Dostoyevsky, Dickens, James, Proust.
 * 1984 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

 * I don't, for example, conjure up characters for the express purpose of despising them, of breaking their humps in public. I used to be astounded at Henry James et al., so nice nasty about it too, soooo refined. Gothic is of no interest to me. I try not to lend energy to building grotesqueries, depicting morbid relationships, dramatizing perversity.
 * Toni Cade Bambara "What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow" in The Writer on Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg (1990)

 * It took me years to ascertain that Henry James' work was giving me little pleasure: In each case I ask myself: "What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?" Question unanswerable! I gave up. To-day I have no recollection whatever of any characters of any events in either novel.
 * Arnold Bennett, Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years, ed. A. Mylett (1974)

 * ... A page of Mr James's later novels is like some vast, high-lifted park, exposing its densely-clad slopes to the rays of a late sun, embossed with the domes of verdure of a hundred shades of green, elms, oaks, and beeches contrasting with dusky pines and the slender silvery poplars of France the whole slope drinking, absorbing the light, blending and fusing its myriad tones and shades. Eidullia, little pictures of an infinite grace, come, as in Dante, to enhance the distinguished charm of the composition.
 * Morton Fullerton, April 1910, quote pp. 402–403

 * James's earlier work had often substituted a character's impression of an event for the event itself. These pages do more - they change our very sense of what counts as an event in fiction. Sitting still counts; thinking, doing nothing, not moving. Emotions count, and the activity of perception as well.
 * Michael Gorra, on chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady, in Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (2012)

 * He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.
 * Graham Greene, 'Henry James', in Derek Verschoyle (ed.), The English Novelists: A Survey of the Novel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists (1936), p. 246

 * When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Henry James, who were able to write great women characters. I don't remember if they said women had done men in this way or not, but I remember thinking that to finish myself as a great artist I'd have to be able to create men characters. Along with that, I was thinking that I had to do more than the first person pronoun.
 * 1991 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.
 * Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 622

 * Henry James is at once the most and least appreciated figure in American writing. His authority as a novelist of unique quality and as an archetypal American has grown immeasurably in the years since his death, and in some literary circles his name has of late been turned into the password of a cult. But at the same time he is still regarded, in those circles that exert the major influence on popular education and intelligence, with the coldness and even derision that he encountered in the most depressed period of his career, when his public deserted him and he found himself almost alone.
 * Philip Rahv, 'Attitudes Toward Henry James', New Republic (15 February 1943), in F. W. Dupee (ed.), The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays (1945), p. 273

 * In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a . Within a very few years he could have had a Freudian analysis, traveled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even space travel.
 * , Europe Transformed, 1878-1919 (1984) p. 15

 * Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.
 * Oscar Wilde, in "The Decay of Lying", in Intentions (1891)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Henry James


text:
Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem (October 23, 1923 – November 18, 2022) was a composer and diarist, best known and most praised for his song settings. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1976.

Quotes

 * The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.

 * The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.

 * Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.
 * Being Alone, The Ontario Review (Spring/Summer 1980)

 * Art means to dare — and to have been right.
 * W magazine (10 October 1980).

title: Ned Rorem


text:
Sadomasochism

Sadomasochism: (/ˌseɪdoʊˈmæsəkɪzəm/ SAY-doh-MASS-ə-kiz-əm) is the giving and receiving of pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation. While the terms sadist and masochist refer respectively to one who enjoys giving and receiving pain, some practitioners of sadomasochism may switch between activity and passivity.

Quotes

 * Her instruments of torture were more numerous than those of any other governess. Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant: she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o'-nine-tails, some with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledoors, made of thick sole-leather, with inch nails run through to docket, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years flagellation. Holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen, called butcher's bush [?butcher's broom]; and during the summer, a glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles, with which she often restored the dead to life. Thus, at her shop, whoever went with plenty of money, could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phlebotomized, and tortured till he had a belly full.
 * Annonymous, as quoted by Henry Spencer Ashbee about Theresa Berkley.

 * She does not believe that Wonder Woman tends to masochism or sadism. Furthermore, she believes that even if it did-you can teach either perversion to children-one can only bring out what is inherent in the child. However she did make the reservation that if the woman slaves wore chains (and enjoyed them) for no purpose whatsoever, there would be no point in chaining them.
 * Dorothy Roubicek quoting Lauretta Bender, M.D., "Secret History of Wonder Woman" by Jill Lepore, p. 240.

 * I urge you all today, especially today during these times of chaos and war, to love yourself without reservations and to love each other without restraint. Unless you're into leather.
 * Margaret Cho The Notorious C.H.O. Tour.

 * The first experiment of 365 Chinese adults found female subs showed decreased empathic ability compared with a control group of non-practitioners. But there was no difference between female “switches” — meaning women who switch between dominant and submissive roles — and the control group. Likewise, there was no difference in empathic ability between male practitioners and the control group. Both male and female practitioners, however, reported diminished feelings of subjective pain intensity when viewing facial expressions indicating pain. “These findings are consistent with previous findings suggesting that the reduction in empathic responses to others’ suffering was associated with frequent exposure to pain-inflicting situations,” the researchers explained.
 * Eric W. Dolan, "Female submissives have reduced empathy to others’ suffering, study on BDSM finds", Psypost, February 27, 2017

 * "What all these people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body - through the eroticization of the body. I think it's...a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure."
 * Quote in Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (Eds.) Who's Who: In Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II (2001), in reference to S/M.

 * My fantasy since I was a small child was to dominate a dominating man. That turns me on more than anything, a man who does not want to be dominated—like Sean Connery, a really macho man. The kind of man who has no desire for submission. It’s truly perverse. It’s the power play: who has it, how long you have it for, and what you do with it.
 * Catherine Robbe-Grillet in "The Thin End of the Whip", Toni Bentley, Vanity Fair, February 2014.

 * It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick', Here is the material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination....The very pre-ponderance of passionately pious men in the colony was virtually an assurance of unnatural crime; insomuch as psychology now proves the religious instinct to be a form of transmuted eroticism precisely parallel to the transmutations in other directions which respectively produce such things as sadism, hallucination, melancholia, and other mental morbidities. Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. This was aggravated, of course, by the Puritan policy of rigorously suppressing all the natural outlets of excuberant feeling--music, laughter, colour, pageantry, and so on. To observe Christmas Day was once a prison offence....
 * H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Robert E. Howard, (October 4, 1930),

 * Pamela Connolly (2006) compared BDSM practitioners to published norms on 10 psychological disorders. Compared to the normative samples, BDSM practitioners had lower levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological sadism, psychological masochism, borderline pathology, and paranoia. (They showed equal levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and higher levels of dissociation and narcissism.) Similarly, Andreas Wismeijer and Marcel van Assen (2013) compared BDSM practitioners to non-BDSM-practitioners on major personality traits. Their results showed that in comparison to non-practitioners, BDSM practitioners exhibited higher levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and subjective well-being. Practitioners also showed lower levels of neuroticism and rejection sensitivity. The one negative trait that emerged? BDSM practitioners showed lower levels of agreeableness than non-practitioners.
 * Joe Magliano, "The Surprising Psychology of BDSM", Psychology Today, (Feb 05 2015).

 * Both bottoms and tops reported increases in relationship closeness and decreases in psychological stress from before to after their scenes (Ambler et al., under review; Sagarin, Cutler, Cutler, Lawler-Sagarin, & Matuszewich, 2009), but bottoms also showed increases in physiological stress as measured by the hormone cortisol (Sagarin et al., 2009). We found this disconnect between psychological stress and physiological stress to be very interesting, and we wondered whether it might indicate that bottoms have entered an altered state of consciousness. To test this theory, we ran a study in which we randomly assigned switches (BDSM practitioners who sometimes take on the top role and sometimes take on the bottom role) to be the top or the bottom in a scene (Ambler et al., under review). The results revealed that both bottoms and tops entered altered states of consciousness, but they entered different altered states. Bottoms entered an altered state called “transient hypofrontality” (Dietrich, 2003), which is associated with reductions in pain, feelings of floating, feelings of peacefulness, feelings of living in the here and now and time distortions. Tops, in contrast, entered the altered state known as “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991), which is associated with focused attention, a loss of self-consciousness and optimal performance of a task. We believe that these pleasurable altered states of consciousness might be one of the motivations that people have for engaging in BDSM activities.
 * Joe Magliano, "The Surprising Psychology of BDSM", Psychology Today, (Feb 05 2015).

 * Whether writing for or against corporal punishment, correspondents provided detailed accounts of inflicting, receiving, and witnessing ritual chastisements in which older women restrained, undressed, and whipped younger ones. Letters described mothers, aunts, teachers and female servants forcing girls and young women to remove their drawers, tying girls to pieces of furniture, pinning back their arms, placing them in handcuffs, or requiring them to count the number of strokes administered. Some letters were written from the point of view of the mother, and guardians who had to impose discipline, others from the perspective of those reminiscing about having been disciplined. Many provided testimonials that began with the recollection of having "screamed, and shrieked and implored" to no avail and ended by celebrating the moral benefits of chastisement.
 * Sharon Marcus Between Women as quoted in Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter comics, 1941-1948 p. 64 by Noah Berlatsky.

 * There are one or two rules of thumb which are useful in distinguishing sadism from exciting adventure in the comics. Threat of torture is harmless, but when the torture it’s self is shown it becomes sadism. When a lovely heroine is show bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive just in the nick of time. The readers wish is to see save the girl, not to see her suffer. A bound or chained person does not suffer even embarrassment in the comics, and the reader, therefore is not being taught to enjoy suffering.
 * William Moulton Marston as quoted in Olive Richard Bryne's, "Don't laugh at the comics" Family Circle, (Oct 25, 1940).

 * Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, it’s the lousy ones you have to look out for—the harmful, destructive, morbid erotic fixations—real sadism, killing, blood-letting, torturing where the pleasure is in the victim’s actual pain, etc. Those are 100 per cent bad and I won’t have any part of them.
 * William Moulton Marston as quoted in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore, (2014), p. 242.

 * [N]o one appeared to wonder whether this S-M proliferation was a lesbian copy of a faggot imitation of patriarchal backlash against feminism.
 * Robin Morgan, "The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies", in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 235.

 * Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
 * Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Ch. V : The Development of the Character-Analytic Technique, p. 173

 * The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.
 * Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) Ch. 1 : Ideology As Material Power, Section 4 : The Social Function of Sexual Suppression quoted in: R. Claire Snyder Citizen-soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, p. 152.

 * Cause I may be bad but I'm perfectly good at it Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it Sticks and stones may break my bones, But chains and whips excite me.
 * Rihanna S&M, (Jan 11, 2011).

 * It's been so long since I made love, I can't even remember who gets tied up.
 * Bettie Page, reported in The Quotable Quote Book (Carol Publishing Group, 1990), p. 258

 * Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.
 * Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), The New York Review of Books (1975-02-06), reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 105.

 * Giantess porn tends to perplex non-kinksters because it falls outside of normative sexual interests. But macro and micro are better understood through BDSM, particularly dominance and submission (D/s) play. As Sex Therapy Australia’s director Pamela Supple told Vice in 2016, “power, domination, and vulnerability” are at macrophilia’s core. The giantess is usually the dominant, while the smaller person is the submissive (but that may not always be the case). “It’s allowing your mind to go wherever it wants to go, whilst engaging in play to gain the maximum sexual arousal,” Supple told Vice. “Some want to feel and experience terror—being crushed or controlled. Everyone is different in what they want to experience.”
 * Pamela Supple as qtd. in Felicity Monk, "The Men Who Want to Have Sex with Actual Giants", Vice, (Oct 26, 2016), as qtd. in Ana Valens, “What is vore porn, and why do people love it?”, The Daily Dot, (2019-09-12).

 * In principle there is a difference between violence which is incidental and violence which is inflicted for the indulgence of cruelty. The violence of sadomasochistic encounters involves the indulgence of cruelty by sadists and the degradation of victims. Such violence is injurious to the participants and unpredictably dangerous. I am not prepared to invent a defence of consent for sadomasochistic encounters which breed and glorify cruelty . . . . Society is entitled and bound to protect itself against a cult of violence. Pleasure derived from the infliction of pain is an evil thing. Cruelty is uncivilized.
 * Lord Templeton, Judgement in the Operation Spanner case.

 * In addition to his bio-physical heresies, Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants.
 * Robert Anton Wilson, in Everything Is Under Control : Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998), p. 361; some of Wilson's account of the suppression of Reich's ideas and work are technically exaggerative: though many of Reich's books mentioning his concepts of orgone energy and the "orgone accumulators" of his laboratory were destroyed the destruction of his equipment and books was not actually total.

title: Sadomasochism


text:
Musical form

The term Musical form (or musical architecture) refers to the overall structure or plan of a piece of music, In the tenth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music, Percy Scholes defines musical form as "a series of strategies designed to find a successful mean between the opposite extremes of unrelieved repetition and unrelieved alteration.

Quotes

 * 'Form' has always come into being in a dialogue between particular 'instances' and the larger body of work, or 'tradition.'
 * Richard Middleton (1999). Form. Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, p. 141. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0631212639.

 * Form is supposed to cover the shape or structure of of the work; content its substance, meaning, ideas, or expressive effects. When the nineteenth-century music critic Eduard Hanslick declared, in an influential phrase, that music is 'forms put into motion through sounds,' he was suggesting that music's real content lies in its form.
 * Richard Middleton (1999). Form. Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, p. 141. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0631212639.

 * The term "chorus form" is often used to denote a type of performance - typically in jazz or rhythm 'n' blues, but also sometimes in country music and rock 'n' roll - where a given structural unit is repeated an indefinite number of times. The unit itself may be sectionally elaborate, as in the case of most Tin Pan Alley ballads. It may be twelve-bar blues, or something similar, as in the case of many R&B and rock 'n' roll numbers: here, a three-line AAB lyric, set to a three-phrase melody, is underpinned by a single gestural sweep in the harmony. Occasionally - as in some funk, dub reggae, and hip-hop, for example - it may approach the status of open-ended process.
 * Richard Middleton (1999). Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, p. 149. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0631212639.

 * There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is a consequence of this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals."
 * Edgard Varese, quoted in Aspects of 20th Century Music, ISBN 0130493465.

 * Form is a theatrical event of a certain length, and the length itself may be unpredictable.
 * Christian Wolff, quoted in Aspects of 20th Century Music, ISBN 0130493465.

title: Musical form


text:
Alfred Kinsey

Alfred Charles Kinsey PhD (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was a sexologist, entomologist and zoologist who founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University at Bloomington (now called the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction).

Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

 * The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.

 * Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.

 * The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species.

Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

 * Some scientists hesitate to continue in a given field of research as soon as its application becomes apparent. This refusal to apply knowledge when it exists seems to us, however, to be as unrealistic as the attempt to apply knowledge before it exists. (page 8)

 * With the right of the scientist to investigate most aspects of the material universe, most persons will agree; but there are some who have questioned the applicability of scientific methods to an investigation of human sexual behavior....It is as though the dietician and biochemist were denied the right to analyze foods and the processes of nutrition, because the cooking and proper serving of food may be rated a fine art, and because the eating of certain foods has been considered a matter for religious regulation. (page 8).

 * There is an honesty in science which demands that the best means be used for the determination of truth. Certainly there are many sorts of truth in the universe, and many aspects of truth must be taken into account if man is to live most effectively in the social organization to which he belongs. But in regard to matter---the stuff of which both non-living materials and living organisms are made---scientists believe that there is no better way of obtaining information than that provided by human sense organs. No theory, no philosophy, no body of theology, no political expediency, no wishful thinking, can provide a satisfactory substitute for the observation of material objects and of the way in which they behave. (page 9).

 * There is an honesty in science which leads to a certain acceptance of reality. There are some who, finding the ocean an impediment to the pursuit of their designs, try to ignore its existence. If they are unable to ignore it because of its size, they try to legislate it out of existence, or try to dry it up with a sponge. They insist that the latter operation would be possible if enough sponges were available, and if enough persons would wield them. There is no ocean of greater magnitude than the sexual function, and there are those who believe that we would do better if we ignored its existence, that we should not try to understand its material origins, and that if we sufficiently ignore it and mop at the flood of sexual activity with new laws, heavier penalties, more pronouncements, and greater intolerances, we may ultimately eliminate the reality. (page 10).

 * It cannot be too frequently emphasized that the behavior of any animal must depend upon on the nature of the stimulus which it meets, its anatomic and physiologic capacities, and its background of previous experience. Unless it has been conditioned by previous experience, an animal should respond identically to identical stimuli, whether they emanate from some part of its own body, from another individual of the same sex, or from an individual of the opposite sex.

 * The inherent physiologic capacity of an animal to respond to any sufficient stimulus seems, then, the basic explanation of the fact that some individuals respond to stimuli originating in other individuals of their own sex-and it appears to indicate that every individual could so respond if the opportunity offered and one were not conditioned against making such responses. There is no need of hypothesizing peculiar hormonal factors that make certain individuals especially liable to engage in homosexual activity, and we know of no data which prove the existence of hormonal factors (p. 758). There are no sufficient data to show that specific hereditary factors are involved. Theories of childhood attachments to one or the other parent, theories of fixation at some infantile level of sexual development, interpretations of homosexuality as neurotic or psychopathic behavior or moral degeneracy, and other philosophic interpretations are not supported by scientific research, and are contrary to the specific data on our series of female and male histories.

 * The impression that infra-human mammals more or less confine themselves to heterosexual activities is a distortion of the fact which appears to have originated in a man-made philosophy, rather than in specific observations of mammalian behavior. Biologists and psychologists who have accepted the doctrine that the only natural function of sex is reproduction, have simply ignored the existence of sexual activity which is not reproductive. They have assumed that heterosexual responses are a part of an animal's innate, "instinctive" equipment, and that all other types of sexual activity represent "perversions" of the "normal instincts". Such interpretations are, however, mystical. They do not originate in our knowledge of the physiology of sexual response (Chapter 15), and can be maintained only if one assumes that sexual function is in some fashion divorced from the physiologic processes which control other functions of the animal body.

 * The mammalian record thus confirms our statement that any animal which is not too strongly conditioned by some special sort of experience is capable of responding to any adequate stimulus. This is what we find in the more uninhibited segments of our human species, and this is what we find among young children who are not too rigorously restrained in their early sex play. Exclusive preferences and patterns of behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, come only with experience, or as a result of social pressures which tend to force an individual into an exclusive pattern of one or the other sort. Psychologists and psychiatrists, reflecting the mores of the culture in which they have been raised, have spent a good deal of time trying explain the origins of homosexual activity; but considering the physiology of sexual response and the mammalian backgrounds of human behavior, it is not so difficult to explain why a human animal does a particular thing sexually. It is more difficult to explain why each and every individual is not involved in every type of sexual activity.

Abortion in the United States, Report of a Conference Sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., (1958)

 * At the risk of being repetitious, I would remind the group that we have found the highest frequency of induced abortion in the group which, in general, most frequently uses contraceptives.

title: Alfred Kinsey