text:
William Styron

William Clark Styron, Jr. (11 June 1925 – 1 November 2006) was an American novelist. He is most famous for two controversial novels: the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), depicting the life of Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt, and Sophie's Choice (1979), which deals with the Holocaust.

 * See also: Sophie's Choice (1982 film based on his novel)

Quotes

 * Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word — life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then.
 * The Paris Review (Spring 1954)

 * A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
 * Interview in Writers at Work, First Series (1958), edited by George Plimpton

 * The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
 * Writers at Work (1958)

 * I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.
 * "A note to the reader" - This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)

 * When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer. I left my position as manuscript reader at the McGraw-Hill Book Company with no regrets; the job had been onerous and boring. It did not occur to me that there would be many difficulties to impede my ambition; in fact, the job itself had been an impediment. All I knew was that I burned to write a novel and I could not have cared less that my bank account was close to zero, with no replenishment in sight. At the age of twenty-two I had such pure hopes in my ability to write not just a respectable first novel, but a novel that would be completely out of the ordinary, that when I left the McGraw-Hill Building for the last time I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
 * "Lie Down In Darkness", This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)

 * It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work.
 * "A Conversation with William Styron", Humanities (May/June 1997)

 * My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
 * "A Conversation with William Styron", Humanities (May/June 1997)

Lie Down in Darkness (1951)

 * RIDING DOWN TO Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly brown clapboard houses which stretch down the hilly streets for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting the pale light of dawn; past the suburban roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which separates the last two hills where in the valley below you can see the James River winding beneath its acid-green crust of scum out beside the chemical plants and more rows of clapboard houses and into the woods beyond.
 * first (opening) sentence of the novel

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

 * A novel depicting Nat Turner, in a fictionalized form extending from the records of The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Leader of the Late Insurrections in Southampton, Va. As fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray (1831)

 * Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still. I’ll lay in de grave and stretch out my arms … Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet. Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption? I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem.
 * Part I : Judgment Day

 * “Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in such a mean conjunction with its own flesh, its own kind. How else account for such faltering, clumsy, hateful cruelty? Even the possums and the skunks know better! Even the weasels and the meadow mice have a natural regard for their own blood and kin. Only the insects are low enough to do the low things that people do — like those ants that swarm on poplars in the summertime, greedily husbanding little green aphids for the honeydew they secrete. Yes, it could be that mankind has yet to be born. Ah, what bitter tears God must weep at the sight of the things that men do to other men!” He broke off then and I saw him shake his head convulsively, his voice a sudden cry: “In the name of money! Money! ”
 * Part II : Old Times Past : Voices, Dreams, Recollections

 * I shivered in the knowledge of the futility of all ambition. My mouth was sour with the yellow recollection of death and blood-smeared fields and walls. I watched the girl slip away, vanish without a hand laid upon her. Who knows but whether we were not doomed to lose. I know nothing any longer. Nothing. Did I really wish to vouchsafe a life for the one that I had taken?
 * Part III : Study War

 * I raise my eyes upward. There alone amidst the blue, steadfast, unmoving, fiery marvel of brightness, shines the morning star. Never has that star seemed so radiant, and I stand gazing at it and do not move though the chill of the damp floor imprisons my feet in piercing icebound pain. Surely I come quickly …
 * Part IV : "It Is Done…"

 * I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet I would have spared one. I would have spared her that showed me Him whose presence I had not fathomed or maybe never even known. Great God, how early it is! Until now I had almost forgotten His name. “Come!” the voice booms, but commanding me now: Come, My son! I turn in surrender. Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Oh how bright and fair the morning star …
 * Part IV : "It Is Done…"

Sophie's Choice (1979)

 * See also Sophie's Choice (the 1982 film based on the novel)

 * Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!"
 * Ch. 15

 * Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz.
 * Ch. 16

 * The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: “At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?” And the answer: “Where was man?”
 * Ch. 16

 * Let your love flow out on all living things. These words at some level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lump-like English syllables... Let your love flow out on all living things. But there are a couple of problems with this precept of mine. The first is, of course, that it is not mine. It springs from the universe and is the property of God, and the words have been intercepted — on the wing, so to speak — by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands upon thousands of lesser prophets, including your narrator, who heard the terrible truth of their drumming somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington and set them down with the fury of a madman sculpting in stone.
 * Ch. 16; the italicized words being quotes of the song "Let Your Love Flow" by Larry E. Williams, as sung by The Bellamy Brothers

 * ’Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star. This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
 * Last lines

This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)

 * Even today, many otherwise well-informed people have never heard the name Nat Turner.
 * Essay, 'This Quiet Dust' [originally published in Harper's, April 1965] - at p.15. [Page numbers per the Vintage Classics paperback collection, 2000 edition.]

 * Neither the Protestant church nor Anglo-American law was equipped to cope with the staggering problem of the status of the Negro: forced to choose between regarding him as a moral human being and as property, they chose the definition of property. The result was the utter degradation of a people. It was an oppression unparalled in human history. This is the problem we are faced with today: too many white Americans still deny the Negro his position as a moral human being.
 * Essay, 'Slave and Citizen' [pub. New York Review of Books, Inaugural Issue, February 1963] - p.37.

 * Numberless factors shape one's needs and longings.
 * Essay, 'A Voice from the South' [pub. The Sewanee Review, Fall 1989] - p.56-57

 * The Consumers Union Report on Smoking was an aid to my stopping a two-pack-a-day habit which commenced in early infancy. For myself, after two or three days of great flaccidity of spirit, an aimless oral yearning, aching moments of hunger at the pit of the stomach, and an awful intermittent urge to burst into tears, the problem resolved itself, and in less than a week all craving vanished. Curiously, for the first time in my life, I developed a racking cough, but this, too, disappeared. A sense of smugness, a kind of fatness of soul, is the reward for such a struggle.
 * Essay, 'The Habit' [pub. New York Review of Books, December 26 1963] - p.66, 67

 * The statistics are meagre, and so we have no way of knowing the number of non-Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers prior to this cut-off date [i.e. 4 April 1943]; not many, compared to the Jews, but certainly they numbered in the tens of thousands. Yet to escape the crematoriums was, of course, to gain only the most feeble hold on the possibility of survival. Statistics regarding the non-Jews who perished during the four years of the existence of Auschwitz as a result of starvation and disease are likewise inexact but somewhat more reliable. It would appear that out of the four million who died, perhaps three quarters of a million - or approximately a fifth of the total - fell into the category which the Nazis termed Aryan. This was at Auschwitz alone.
 * Essay, 'Hell Reconsidered' [pub. New York Review of Books, June 29 1978] - p.112

 * Simon Wiesenthal, the head of the Jewish Center of Documentation in Vienna, expressed his feelings on the matter in a recent interview:  "[...] I've battled for years with Jewish organisations, warning them that we shouldn't always talk about the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. I say let's talk about eleven million civilians, among them six million Jews, who were killed. It's our Jewish fault that in the eyes of the world this whole problem became reduced to the problem between the Nazis and the Jews; the problem obviously was much broader."
 * Essay, 'Hell Reconsidered' [pub. New York Review of Books, June 29 1978] - p.113

 * Camus's great essay "Reflections on the Guillotine" was alone almost enough - in its persuasive logic and eloquence - to make me an enemy of capital punishment.
 * Introduction to three essays concerned with the fate of death row prisoner Benjamin Reid - p.121

 * The Shabaka [Sundiata Waglini] story illuminates the most sordid defects of capital punishment. His blackness and poverty helped doom him. He was ruthlessly cheated; it was never his privilege to be granted - even for a phantom crime - the incarceration [i.e. instead of death row] that it meted out to others and that carries the possibility of redemption.
 * Essay, 'Death Row' [pub. New York Times Op-Ed Page, May 10 1987] - p.168

 * To those of us who have suffered severe depression - myself included - this general unawareness of how relentlessly the disease can generate an urge to self-destruction seems widespread; the problem badly needs illumination. What is saddening about Primo Levi's death is the suspicion that his way of dying was not inevitable and that with proper care he might have been rescued from the abyss. I find it difficult not to believe that if Mr Levi had been under capable hospital attention, sequestered from the unbearable daily world in a setting where he would have been safe from his self-destructive urge, and where time would have permitted the storm raging in his brain to calm itself and die away, he would be among us now.
 * Essay, 'Why Primo Levi need not have died' [pub. New York Times Op-Ed Page, December 19 1988] - p.170, 171

 * For General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, military life may be symbolized by "beacons flashing across uncharted depths . . . faint bugles sounding reveille," but for many if not most of his countrymen it is something else: it is reveille. It is training manuals and twenty-mile hikes, stupefying lectures on platoon tactics and terrain and the use of the Lister bag, mountains of administrative paperwork, compulsive neatness and hideous barracks in Missouri and Texas, sexual deprivation, hot asphalt drill fields and deafening rifle ranges, daily tedium unparalleled in its ferocity, awful food, bad pay, ignorant people and a ritualistic demand for ass-kissing almost unique in the quality of its humiliation. The world that MacArthur thrills to makes most of his fellow Americans choke with horror.
 * Essay, 'MacArthur' [pub. New York Review of Books, October 8 1964] - p.214

 * I think it is absolute and unimpeachable testimony to a book's impact on us that we are able to associate it so keenly with the time and the surroundings and the circumstances in which we read it. Only a very great work can produce this memory; [...] There is what psychologists call a gestalt, an unforgettability of interwoven emotions with which the work will ever in recollection be connected with the environment. Somehow the excitement of reading All the King's Men is always linked in my mind with the howling blizzard outside and the snow piling up in a solid white impacted mass outside my basement window. [...] I finished All the King's Men as in a trance, knowing once and for all that I, too, however falteringly and incompletely, must try to work such magic.
 * Section, 'Robert Penn Warren' [part of a speech delivered at the Lotus Club, New York, April 1975] - p.269

 * When At Play in the Fields of the Lord was published in 1965 there was revealed in stunning outline the fully realized work of a novelist writing at white heat and at the peak of his powers; [...] Peter is a poet and a scientist, and the mingling of these two personae has given us such carefully observed, unsentimental, yet lyrically echoing works as The Cloud Forest, Under the Mountain Wall, The Tree where Man was Born and The Snow Leopard. [...] We behold a writer of phenomenal scope and versatility.
 * Section, 'Peter Mattheissen' [from the Introduction to Peter Mattheissen, A Bibliography: 1951-1979, compiled by D. Nichols (Orirana Press, 1979)] - p.273, 274

 * William Blackburn [i.e. one of William Styron's teachers] cared about writing and had an almost holy concern for the langage. Before too long my work got much better. I sweated like a coolie over my essays, themes and fledgling short stories until my splintered syntax and humpbacked prose achieved a measure of clarity and grace. He informed me that one could not become a writer without a great deal of reading. To write one must read, he repeated, read . . . He was unquestionably a glorious teacher. I deeply miss him. It helped immeasurably to have him tell me, at the age of twenty-one, that I could become a writer.
 * Section, 'William Blackburn' [From Duke Encounters. Durham: Duke University Office of Publications, 1977] - p.275, 276, 277, 278

 * I bought a bottle of old Grand-Dad bourbon; it was, I remember precisely, a full half pint, which was a prodigious amount of booze for a young man of twenty - at least, I know, for me. I got gloriously drunk on the Southern Railway local that rattled its way all night up through the Carolinas, gazing out at the bleak, moon-drenched wintry fields and happily pondered my deliverance. The chancellor, bless his soul, had really taken most of the curse off the bitter defeat I had initially felt there at the Biltmore. It really was better for me not to go to Oxford, I told myself, throwing in various Anglophilic injunctions: the food you wouldn't feed to a starving hound dog, the men were prancing homosexuals, the women all had foul breath, it was a moribund civilisation. "Screw Oxford," I remember saying aloud, and "Up yours, Cecil Rhodes!" Next year, instead of shivering to death in some library carrel, instead of - "Get this, old fellow!" I heard myself cackling - instead of writing a paper on the hexameters of Arthur Hugh Clough, that old Victorian nanny, I would be in New York, beginning my first novel.
 * Section, 'Almost a Rhodes Scholar' [part of a speech delivered to the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, Georgia, in December 1979, about an interview leading to a rejection in 1947.] - p.322

 * And as I began to discipline and harness myself, began for the first time to examine as coldly and as clinically as I could the tough problems which before this I had refused to face, I had a fine revelation. I realized that what had been lacking in my novelist's vision was really a sense of architecture - a symmetry, perhaps unobtrusive but always there, without which a novel sprawls, becoming a self-indulgent octopus. It was a matter of form, and up until now this was an issue that out of laziness or fear, perhaps both, I had tried to avoid. I completed Lie Down in Darkness on a spring evening in 1951 in a room on West Eighty-Eighth Street in Manhattan.
 * Essay, 'Lie Down in Darkness [pub. Hartford Courant Magazine'', January 3 1982] - p.327, 328

Darkness Visible (1990)

 * Darkness Visible : A Memoir of Madness (1990)

 * In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind — a struggle which had engaged me for several months — might have a fatal outcome.
 * I, first lines

 * Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self — to the mediating intellect — as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, “the blues” which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form.
 * I

 * When I was a young writer there had been a stage where Camus, almost more than any other contemporary literary figure, radically set the tone for my own view of life and history. I read his novel The Stranger somewhat later than I should have — I was in my early thirties — but after finishing it I received the stab of recognition that proceeds from reading the work of a writer who has wedded moral passion to a style of great beauty and whose unblinking vision is capable of frightening the soul to its marrow. The cosmic loneliness of Meursault, the hero of that novel, so haunted me that when I set out to write The Confessions of Nat Turner I was impelled to use Camus’s device of having the story flow from the point of view of a narrator isolated in his jail cell during the hours before his execution. For me there was a spiritual connection between Meursault’s frigid solitude and the plight of Nat Turner — his rebel predecessor in history by a hundred years — likewise condemned and abandoned by man and God. Camus’s essay “Reflections on the Guillotine” is a virtually unique document, freighted with terrible and fiery logic; it is difficult to conceive of the most vengeful supporter of the death penalty retaining the same attitude after exposure to scathing truths expressed with such ardor and precision. I know my thinking was forever altered by that work, not only turning me around completely, convincing me of the essential barbarism of capital punishment, but establishing substantial claims on my conscience in regard to matters of responsibility at large. Camus was a great cleanser of my intellect, ridding me of countless sluggish ideas, and through some of the most unsettling pessimism I had ever encountered causing me to be aroused anew by life’s enigmatic promise.
 * II

 * One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Reading this for the first time I was puzzled and continued to be throughout much of the essay, since despite the work’s persuasive logic and eloquence there was a lot that eluded me, and I always came back to grapple vainly with the initial hypothesis, unable to deal with the premise that anyone should come close to wishing to kill himself in the first place. A later short novel, The Fall, I admired with reservations; the guilt and self-condemnation of the lawyer-narrator, gloomily spinning out his monologue in an Amsterdam bar, seemed a touch clamorous and excessive, but at the time of my reading I was unable to perceive that the lawyer was behaving very much like a man in the throes of clinical depression. Such was my innocence of the very existence of this disease.
 * II

My annoyance over all this was so intense that I was prompted to write a short piece for the op-ed page of the Times. The argument I put forth was fairly straightforward: the pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. Through the healing process of time — and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases — most people survive depression, which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.
 * This general unawareness of what depression is really like was apparent most recently in the matter of Primo Levi, the remarkable Italian writer and survivor of Auschwitz who, at the age of sixty-seven, hurled himself down a stairwell in Turin in 1987. Since my own involvement with the illness, I had been more than ordinarily interested in Levi’s death, and so, late in 1988, when I read an account in The New York Times about a symposium on the writer and his work held at New York University, I was fascinated but, finally, appalled. For, according to the article, many of the participants, worldly writers and scholars, seemed mystified by Levi’s suicide, mystified and disappointed. It was as if this man whom they had all so greatly admired, and who had endured so much at the hands of the Nazis — a man of exemplary resilience and courage — had by his suicide demonstrated a frailty, a crumbling of character they were loath to accept. In the face of a terrible absolute — self-destruction — their reaction was helplessness and (the reader could not avoid it) a touch of shame.
 * III

As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. “Brainstorm,” for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed. Told that someone’s mood disorder has evolved into a storm — a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else — even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that “depression” evokes, something akin to “So what?” or “You’ll pull out of it” or “We all have bad days.” The phrase “nervous breakdown” seems to be on its way out, certainly deservedly so, owing to its insinuation of a vague spinelessness, but we still seem destined to be saddled with “depression” until a better, sturdier name is created.
 * When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word “depression.” Depression, most people know, used to be termed “melancholia,” a word which appears in English as early as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. “Melancholia” would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated — the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer — had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering “depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.
 * IV

 * I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.
 * V

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
 * There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain’s demands — o accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it. Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to that alleviation, whether it be through sleep or Tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body’s capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive for having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart.
 * VI

 * For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would be lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile.
 * VI

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Ché la diritta via era smarrita.'' I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path.
 * In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:
 * ''Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
 * In the middle of the journey of our life
 * One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.
 * X

And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.
 * For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as “the shining world.” There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.
 * E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
 * X

Quotes about Styron

 * "Confessions of Nat Turner," is a book I admire very much. But, you see, I read that book as the "Confessions of Bill Styron" and I'm not trying to put the book down when I say that. I respect the book very much. I respect him very much and I respect his attempt to grapple with something almost no one in his generation is prepared to even look at... The book meant something to me because it was a white Southern writer's attempt to deal with something that was tormenting him and frightening him. I respect him very much for that. Now, as to his execution, what is one to say about it? (“I'm still waiting for the white writer to write a novel about a lynching from the point of view of the lyncher.”) Yes, I quite agree with you. I said before that America's effort to avoid the presence of black people constricts American literature. It creates a trap white writers find themselves in.
 * Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

title: William Styron


text:
User talk:MegaZeo~enwikiquote

Hi,, welcome back to Wikiquote ;-) Here are some useful links:
 * Browse To browse the site.
 * Reference desk To ask some questions related to quotes.
 * Village pump To discuss with other editors.
 * Community Portal Other useful links.

Shortly be bold and enjoy!--Aphaia 00:43, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called MegaZeo. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name MegaZeo~enwikiquote that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 23:30, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 05:52, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

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

title: User talk:MegaZeo~enwikiquote


text:
User talk:68.23.42.11

Welcome to Wikiquote, the free compendium of quotations! You don't have to log in to read or edit articles on Wikiquote, but creating an account is quick, free and non-intrusive, requires you to provide no personal information, and gives you many benefits, including:
 * The use of a username of your choice
 * The ability to view all your contributions via a "My contributions" link
 * Your own user page
 * Your own talk page which, if you choose, also allows users to send you messages without knowing your e-mail address
 * The use of your own personal watchlist to which you can add articles that interest you
 * The ability to rename pages
 * The ability to upload images
 * The ability to customize the appearance and behavior of the website
 * The eligibility to become an administrator
 * The right to be heard in formal votes and elections, and on pages like votes for deletion

Click here to create an account.--Aphaia 00:45, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:68.23.42.11


text: User talk:68.83.151.201

title: User talk:68.83.151.201


text: User talk:198.53.12.84

title: User talk:198.53.12.84


text: User talk:70.110.164.28

title: User talk:70.110.164.28


text: User talk:24.11.45.99

title: User talk:24.11.45.99


text: User talk:62.163.30.180

title: User talk:62.163.30.180


text: User talk:24.12.242.93

title: User talk:24.12.242.93


text:
John Gardner (American writer)

John Champlin Gardner Jr. (July 21, 1933 – September 14, 1982) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. He published ten volumes of criticism, five books for children, two works of poetry, two collections of short stories, and eight novels. He died in a motorcycle accident at age 49.

 * See also: Grendel

Quotes

 * It's true that, in my books, monsters are always important. People are monsters, people are called monsters by other characters, and so on. Really, there are three kinds of things that are important in my things, I think. One is monsters, another is clowns, and another is human beings, and of course, they keep shapeshifting. One turns into the other. Clowns are always trying to be human beings. What I mean by clowns is this: Human beings do things and clowns desperately try to imitate human beings, so the acrobat gets up on the wire, and then the clown wants to be an acrobat and he tries, but he's a straw man and he can't be. He's always acting. He's always pretending. He's always faking and mimicking. Many of us feel that about ourselves all the time. That is to say, we put on masks and never find out who we really are.  And one of the things that happens in a novel is characters who start out as clowns try to earn the grade as human beings, and sometimes they turn into monsters instead. Monsters are those things that I used to go to Saturday afternoon movies and see. I mean by monsters, "walking dead". I mean nihilists. People who really have given up on all faith and so on, and act as if the world were evil, and as if all people were either stupid or malicious. They're creatures who have given in to the emotional war that's in everybody. Sometimes, I use, for instance, in Henry Soames in Nickel Mountain, a monstrous kind of body which contains monstrous emotions, but he's holding it in, and the thing of course, finally, is that he really is a monster and he's holding it in and that makes him human, that constantly he does what he knows is right, whatever the power of his emotions. So, your monsters are everywhere.
 * The Writer In America - John C. Gardner (Perspective Films Documentary 1975)

On Moral Fiction (1977)

 * Technically our novelists (for instance) are shrewd enough, and publishers and reviewers seem, as never before, eager to be of use. Nevertheless, wherever we look it's the same: commercial slickness, misplaced cleverness, posturing, wild floundering -- dullness. Though not widely advertised, this is general knowledge. When one talks with editors of serious fiction, they all sound the same: they speak of their pleasure and satisfaction in their work, but more often than not the editor cannot think, under the moment's pressure, of a single contemporary writer he really enjoys reading. Some deny, even publicly, that any first-rate American novelists now exist. The ordinary reader has been saying that for years...
 * pp. 56-57 (in the HarperCollins BasicBooks edition), "Premises on Art and Morality"

 * True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.
 * p. 19 (in the HarperCollins BasicBooks edition), "Premises on Art and Morality"

Quotes about Gardner

 * [John Gardner would] take one of my early efforts at a story and go over it with me. I remember him as being very patient, wanting me to understand what he was trying to show me, telling me over and over how important it was to have the right words saying what I wanted them to say. Nothing vague or blurred, no smoked-glass prose. And he kept drumming at me the importance of using—I don't know how else to say it—common language, the language of normal discourse, the language we speak to each other in. [...] All I know is that the advice he was handing out in those days was just what I needed at that time. He was a wonderful teacher. It was a great thing to have happen to me at that period of my life, to have someone who took me seriously enough to sit down and go over a manuscript with me. I knew something crucial was happening to me, something that mattered. He helped me to see how important it was to say exactly what I wanted to say and nothing else; not to use "literary" words or "pseudo-poetic" language. He taught me to use contractions in my writing. He helped show me how to say what I wanted to say and to use the minimum number of words to do so. He made me see that absolutely everything was important in a short story. It was of consequence where the commas and periods went.
 * Raymond Carver. From his essay, "Fires"

 * I don't know how Gardner might have been with other students when it came time to have conferences with them about their work. I suspect he gave everybody a good amount of attention. But it was and still is my impression that during that period he took my stories more seriously, read them closer and more carefully, than I had any right to expect. I was completely unprepared for the kind of criticism I received from him. Before our conference he would have marked up my story, crossing out unacceptable sentences, phrases, individual words, even some of the punctuation; and he gave me to understand that these deletions were not negotiable. In other cases he would bracket sentences, phrases, or individual words, and these were items we'd talk about, these cases were negotiable. And he wouldn't hesitate to add something to what I'd written—a word here and there, or else a few words, maybe a sentence that would make clear what I was trying to say. We'd discuss commas in my story as if nothing else in the world mattered more at that moment—and, indeed, it did not. He was always looking to find something to praise. When there was a sentence, a line of dialogue, or a narrative passage that he liked, something that he thought "worked" and moved the story along in some pleasant or unexpected way, he'd write "Nice" in the margin, or else "Good!" And seeing these comments, my heart would lift. It was close, line-by-line criticism he was giving me, and the reasons behind the criticism, why something ought to be this way instead of that; and it was invaluable to me in my development as a writer. After this kind of detailed talk about the text, we'd talk about the larger concerns of the story, the "problem" it was trying to throw light on, the conflict it was trying to grapple with, and how the story might or might not fit into the grand scheme of story writing. It was his conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiment were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it. A writer's value and craft. This is what the man taught and what he stood for, and this is what I've kept by me in the years since that brief but all-important time.
 * Raymond Carver. "John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher". (Raymond Carver's Foreword to John Gardner's book "On Becoming a Novelist" (1983), published shortly after John Gardner's death.]''

 * As my teacher, John C. Gardner did not so much bring me to the word, as he carried me home once again to the flesh of the words that so much of my academic background had year after bloody year destroyed. He returned the eye that the king of trolls had stolen from Woden, my eye that too many literary critics had forced to become blind to listening. John made reading–in place of mere meaning-scavenging–possible once again. The boundless page of schizophrenic resistance. He put me in a position to begin forgetting in order to remember, not with some sort of Garden of Eden innocence, but with voices, echoes, and uncertainty. John blew off the institutional dust that had, because of the desire of the academic industries to explain away beauty, accumulated over William Faulkner’s breathing and returned me to the dizzy breathlessness of Faulkner’s writing. Faulkner’s words, John reminded me, are made from blood, are marked in blood; they are not simply palaces of meaning, convoluted places where dead or dying scholars meet to whisper over the runes in secretive hermeneutic struggles. Read Faulkner’s sentences aloud. Feel them move, not from the page, but from inside the depths of your own body. It was with the recovery of this listening eye that I was finally able to burst into writing. John taught me to hear in physical ways the rhythm of my lips forming words. The touching of two lips, of lips to tongue, each-to-each. The ineluctable modality of the visible. Closed eyes on a beach.
 * Doug Rice, "Remembering John C. Gardner". From the Doug Rice website article (11 September 2016)

 * I remember John’s hands wrapped around his pipe. His scent. I remember descending into the basement of the English Department building at S.U.N.Y.-Binghamton and thinking this is the home of John, Grendel’s dragon. Smoking. I can’t imagine John in a smokeless building. Knowing John, he’d burn such buildings to the ground. Return such an idea to some level of Dante’s Hell. Why should buildings be kept so innocent of a man’s presence? John’s steaming pipe was a part of his signature. I am thankful that I studied with him before the panics of second hand smoke. Of course, John was not much for obeying signs. And he belonged in that basement, or, more aptly, the basement belonged to John. He was “of” the basement. Soiled man of mud. The earth. Other professors seemed out of place down there. Almost frightened by the cold, damp, crusty hallway. All of them seemed to be struggling to get better offices, offices on the first floor among the living. Not John. This was John’s lair. He once told me that the walls of the school would fall down if he ever left. Now, when I return to Binghamton, more than anything else I feel John’s absence. The halls no longer seem to be on fire.
 * Doug Rice, "Remembering John C. Gardner". From the Doug Rice website article (11 September 2016)

title: John Gardner (American writer)


text:
User talk:85.64.187.2

Welcome to Wikiquote, the free compendium of quotations! You don't have to log in to read or edit articles on Wikiquote, but creating an account is quick, free and non-intrusive, requires you to provide no personal information, and gives you many benefits, including:
 * The use of a username of your choice
 * The ability to view all your contributions via a "My contributions" link
 * Your own user page
 * Your own talk page which, if you choose, also allows users to send you messages without knowing your e-mail address
 * The use of your own personal watchlist to which you can add articles that interest you
 * The ability to rename pages
 * The ability to upload images
 * The ability to customize the appearance and behavior of the website
 * The eligibility to become an administrator
 * The right to be heard in formal votes and elections, and on pages like votes for deletion

Click here to create an account. and congrats for 100 articles of He Wikiquote! --Aphaia 20:18, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:85.64.187.2


text:
Creation

Creation is the act of creating something.

Quotes

 * Creation means discovery of a new reality that exists but that has not yet been noticed. The word is alive again. The speaking word. The verbs are in revolt—a revolt of the masses against the representation that has always been the main weapon of the state. The power is not in the state but in the culture of the people, by the people, and for the people.
 * Giannina Braschi, United States of Banana  (2011), p. 121

 * The major element of creation is love, and the major action of love is Art.
 * Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Art and Life

 * The Biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being.
 * Abraham Joshua Heschel, in The Wisdom of Heschel (1970), p. 150

 * I made the earth and created man on it. I stretched out the heavens with my own hands, and I give orders to all their army. For this is what Jehovah says, the Creator of the heavens, the true God, the One who formed the earth, its Maker who firmly established it, who did not create it simply for nothing, but formed it to be inhabited: “I am Jehovah, and there is no one else."
 * Book of Isaiah 45:12, 18.

 * In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.
 * Maxine Hong Kingston The Fifth Book of Peace (2003)

 * When a man begins to talk about creation and the origin of man, he is butting against the facts incessantly. Go on saying, Our planet and man were created — and you will be fighting against hard facts for ever, analyzing and losing time over trifling details—unable to even grasp the whole. But once admit that... both planets and man are —states for a given time; that their present appearance — geological and anthropological — is transitory and but a condition concomitant of that stage of evolution at which they have arrived in the descending cycle — and all will become plain. You will easily understand what is meant by the one and only element or principle in the universe and that androgynous; the seven-headed serpent Ananda of Vishnu, the Nag around Buddha, the great dragon eternity biting with its active head, its passive tail, from the emanations of which spring worlds, beings and things. You will comprehend the reason why the first philosopher proclaimed all — maya...
 * Koot Hoomi, in  The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, p. 75-76  (1923)

 * Man was created for the sole purpose of rejoicing in God and deriving pleasure from the splendor of His Presence; for this is true joy and the greatest pleasure that can be found.
 * Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim (1738)

 * The history of creation, regarded by some in very early ages as probably "mythical," has, indeed, been proved to be certainly so, but the myth includes teaching of much more significance to us than the supposed history, and everyone should be glad to discover this additional proof that the aim of the writers of Scripture was not to satisfy our idle curiosity about facts which do not concern us. The doctrine of evolution promises to be of very easy assimilation by the Church.
 * Coventry Patmore, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower (London: George Bell and Sons, 1895), Knowledge and Science XXX, p. 87

 * Creation does not cease just because there is darkness!
 * Suman Pokhrel, In Midnight Street

 * Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and the day are signs for those of understanding.
 * Quran 3:190

 * Say, (O Muhammad), "Travel through the land and observe how He began creation. Then Allah will produce the final creation. Indeed Allah, over all things, is competent."
 * Quran 29:20

 * Is not He who created the heavens and the earth Able to create the likes of them? Yes, (it is so); and He is the Knowing Creator.
 * Quran 36:81

 * Not only did the lord make the world appear in its correct form, the lord who never changes the destinies which he determines – Enlil – who will make the human seed of the Land come forth from the earth – and not only did he hasten to separate heaven from earth, and hasten to separate earth from heaven, but, in order to make it possible for humans to grow in "where flesh came forth" [the name of a cosmic location], he first raised the axis of the world at . He did this with the help of the hoe -- and so daylight broke forth.
 * Song of the Hoe.

 * If we find great difficulty from its admirable arrangement in conceiving that the Universe has existed from all eternity, and to resolve this difficulty suppose a Creator, how much more clearly must we perceive the necessity of this very Creator’s creation whose perfections comprehend an arrangement far more accurate and just.
 * Percy Bysshe Shelley, Eusebes and Theosophus

 * The genius is childlike. Like children he looks into the world as into a new creation and finds there a perennial source of wonder and delight.
 * John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 27

 * The nearest we approach God ... is as creative beings. The poet, by echoing the primary imagination, recreates. Through his work he forces those who read him to do the same, thus bringing them ... nearer to the actual being of God as displayed in action.
 * R. S. Thomas, in The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (1963), p. 8

 * All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.
 * Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

title: Creation


text:
Darwinism

Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by Charles Darwin and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.

 * CONTENT : A - F, G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also, External links

Quotes

 * Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

 * There may be more truth in the adventurous pangenesis of Darwin — whom Tyndall calls a "soaring speculator" — than in the cautious, line-bound hypothesis of the latter... If we accept Darwin's theory of the development of species, we find that his starting-point is placed in front of an open door. We are at liberty with him, to either remain within, or cross the threshold, beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible, or rather the Unutterable.
 * Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology Part I,   (1877), p. 54

 * But what lies back of the Darwinian line of descent? So far as he is concerned nothing but "unverifiable hypotheses." For, as he puts it, he views all beings "as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." ("Origin of Species," pp. 448, 489, first edition) He does not attempt to show us who these "few beings" were. But it answers our purpose quite as well, for in the admission of their existence at all, resort to the ancients for corroboration and elaboration of the idea receives the stamp of scientific approbation. With all the changes that our globe has passed through as regards temperature, climate, soil, and — if we may be pardoned, in view of recent developments — its electromagnetic condition, he would be bold indeed who dare say that anything in present science contradicts the ancient hypothesis of ante-Silurian man.
 * Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Part I,   (1877), p. 154

 * Chaldean Kabalists tell us that primeval man, who, contrary to the Darwinian theory was purer, wiser, and far more spiritual, as shown by the myths of the Scandinavian Bur, the Hindu Dejotas, and the Mosaic "sons of God," — in short, of a far higher nature than the man of the present Adamic race, became despiritualized or tainted with matter, and then, for the first time, was given the fleshly body, which is typified in Genesis in that profoundly significant verse: "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them."
 * Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Part I,   (1877), p. 158

 * The Egyptian Pyramid also symbolically represents this idea of the mundane tree. Its apex is the mystic link between heaven and earth, and stands for the root, while the base represents the spreading branches, extending to the four cardinal points of the universe of matter. It conveys the idea that all things had their origin in spirit — evolution having originally begun from above and proceeded downward, instead of the reverse, as taught in the Darwinian theory. In other words, there has been a gradual materialization of forms until a fixed ultimate of debasement is reached. This point is that at which the doctrine of modern evolution enters into the arena of speculative hypothesis.
 * Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Part I,   (1877), p. 162

 * The whole Darwinian theory of natural selection is included in the first six chapters of the Book of Genesis. The "Man" of chapter i. is radically different from the "Adam" of chapter ii., for the former was created "male and female" — that is, bi-sexed — and in the image of God; while the latter, according to verse seven, was formed of the dust of the ground, and became "a living soul," after the Lord God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life."
 * Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Part I,   (1877), p. 303

 * Space fails us to present the speculative views of certain ancient and mediæval occultists... Suffice it that they antedated Darwin, embraced more or less all his theories on natural selection and the evolution of species, and largely extended the chain at both ends. Moreover, these philosophers were explorers as daring in psychology as in physiology and anthropology. They never turned aside from the double parallel-path traced for them by their great master Hermes. "As above, so below," was ever their axiom; and their physical evolution was traced out simultaneously with the spiritual one.
 * Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Part I,   (1877), p. 429

 * There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.
 * Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 9 “Puncturing Punctuationism” (p. 250)

 * The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.
 * Richard Dawkins River out of Eden (1995)

 * Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.
 * Michael Denton, in  Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
 * I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by individual behaviour, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don't think it's a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation.
 * Richard Dawkins Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview by Frank Miele (1995)

 * The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it.
 * William A. Dembski

 * Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises, because more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on Earth evolved, or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to ask, and answer, the question "Why?" Darwin's new perspective turns several traditional assumptions upside down, undermining our standard ideas about what ought to count as satisfying answers to this ancient and inescapable question. Here science and philosophy get completely intertwined. Scientists sometimes deceive themsevles into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.
 * The Darwinian Revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution, and neither revolution could have occurred without the other. As we shall see, it was the philosophical prejudices of the scientists, more than their lack of scientific evidence, that prevented them from seeing how the theory could actually work, but those philosophical prejudices that had to be overthrown were too deeply entrenched to be dislodged by mere philosophical brilliance. It took an irresistible parade of hard-won scientific facts to force thinkers to take seriously the weird new outlook that Darwin proposed.
 * Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea.  It is a dangerous idea. My admiration for Darwin's magnificent idea is unbounded, but I, too, cherish many of the ideas and ideals that it seems to challenge, and want to protect them. … The only good way to do this—the only way that has a chance in the long run—is to cut through the smokescreens and look at the idea as unflinchingly, as dispassionately, as possible.
 * Daniel Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), from Chapter 1, "Is Nothing Sacred", p. 21-22:

 * The idea of Darwinian natural evolution was paramount in Hayek’s early development. His family background was primarily in the natural sciences. While his maternal grandfather, Franz von Juraschek, was an economist and friend of some of the original mem bers of the Austrian school of economics, Juraschek died in 1910, when Hayek was ten or eleven. Despite Hayek’s precociousness, he could not have been much influenced by this grandfather. A far greater intellectual influence on Friedrich was his father, August, who was a medical doctor for the City of Vienna and a part-time professor of botany at the University of Vienna. Hayek mentioned the intellectual influence of his father on him in a late interview: “We have talked... about my contemporaries and to some extent about the influence of my father, which was of some importance.”
 * Alan Ebenstein, Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003), Ch. 1. Darwinian Evolutionary Theory

 * The intellectual milieu of Hayek’s youth was Darwinian. Hayek remarked that both his father and paternal grandfather were Darwinians and that everyone with whom his family associated through his fa ther’s university connections was secular. He recalled that, when he was about fourteen, his father gave him a substantial treatise on the theory of evolution. If he had received the work a year later, he noted, “I probably would have stuck with biology. The things did interest me immensely.” Hayek was extremely interested in botany until he was fifteen or so. It is easy to imagine that conversations regarding his father’s botanical work were a frequent topic around the Hayek family dinner table. August traveled extensively on plant expeditions and had a small business selling and exchanging plant specimens with which young Fritz (Hayek’s nickname, which he disliked) assisted him. The two also went to meetings of the Vienna Zoologic and Botanical Society together. It is possible that three generations of von Hayeks sometimes attended these meetings—Gustav, August, and Friedrich.
 * Alan Ebenstein, Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003), Ch. 1. Darwinian Evolutionary Theory

 * The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest — Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. "Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival." Darwinism: That survivors survive.
 * Charles Fort, The Book of The Damned (1919) Ch. 3

G - L

 * What’s being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there’s a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
 * George Gilder Interview with the Boston Globe (July 27, 2005)

 * I'm not familiar that they're dodging it. Maybe they are. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that's why it's called the theory of evolution.
 * Mike Huckabee, quoted in

 * What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What if species should offer residual phenomena, here and there, not explicable by natural selection? Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, or is not, the case; but in either event they will owe the author of "The Origin of Species" an immense debt of gratitude...... And viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since the publication of Von Baer's "Researches on Development," thirty years ago, any work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated.
 * Thomas Henry Huxley. "ART. VIII.- Darwin on the origin of Species," Westminster Review, April 1860, p. 541–70

 * Scientists have long known that Darwinism is false. They have adhered to the myth out of self-interest and a zealous desire to put down God.
 * Phillip E. Johnson, Interview with Claire Cooper, Legal Affairs Writer, published in "Berkeley Law Professor Finds Darwin Wanting: Author Calls Evolution 'Imaginative Story' ", Sacramento Bee, 3 June 1991, p. B5

 * In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense-not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
 * Peter Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion.

M - R

 * The row was over Darwinism, but before it ended Darwinism was almost forgotten. What Huxley fought for was something far greater: the right of civilized men to think freely and speak freely, without asking leave of authority, clerical or lay. How new that right is! And yet how firmly held! Today it would be hard to imagine living without it. No man of self-respect, when he has a thought to utter, pauses to wonder what the bishops will have to say about it. The views of bishops are simply ignored. Yet only sixty years ago they were still so powerful that they gave Huxley the battle of his life.
 * H. L. Mencken in "Thomas Henry Huxley" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (4 May 1925).

 * There is an old Qabbalistic axiom which runs as follows: "The stone becomes a plant; the plant a animal; the animal a man; and the man a god." So it is; but the literal form of these words should not be construed as expressing a perfect Darwinism; not at all... We must not imagine for a moment that the natural truth of progressive development, modernly called evolution, is something new in our age or in the age of our immediate fathers, nor that it originated in the mind of Charles Darwin, whose great work, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859...The psychology of the times following the publication of Darwin's works was so strong that most thinking men could not then be brought to admit that there were any alternative explanations of the phenomena of progressive development in life — human, animal, or plant life — to the scheme of transformism which he set forth...This idea of a progressive development of all animate entities on earth in present and past geological periods is, indeed, a very old one.
 * G. de Purucker, Man in Evolution, (1941)

S - Z

 * Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating.
 * The Left Doesn’t Like Darwin Either, by Steve Sailer, VDARE, August 7, 2005

 * Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.
 * John Maynard Smith The Theory of Evolution (1958) p. xv

 * Natural selection is the only workable explanation for the beautiful and compelling illusion of 'design' that pervades every living body and every organ. Knowledge of evolution may not be strictly useful in everyday commerce. You can live some sort of life and die without ever hearing the name of Darwin. But if, before you die, you want to understand why you lived in the first place, Darwinism is the one subject that you must study.
 * John Maynard Smith The Theory of Evolution (1958) p.xvi

 * Darwinism is still very much alive, utterly dominating biology. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to prove the creation of a single distinct species by Darwinist means, Darwinism dominates the academy and the media.
 * Ben Stein

 * [The] Third [problem with Darwinism], which I think is overwhelming, and just sort of blows the whole theory of Random Mutation out of the water, is, at least, let me say, raises big questions, that is. Assuming it all did happen by Random Mutation and Natural Selection, where did the laws of gravity come from. Where did the laws of thermodynamics come from? Where did the laws of motion and, of heat come from? Where, I guess that's the same as thermodynamics. Where did all these laws, that make it possible for the universe to function, where did they all come from? Why isn't all just chaos and everything collapsing in on itself and killing everything?
 * Ben Stein

 * Neo-Darwinists ask us to believe in things not seen. We’re not supposed to have an established religion in America, but we do, and it’s called Darwinism.
 * Ben Stein

 * The truth is Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but a materialistic creation myth masquerading as science. It is first and foremost a weapon against religion – especially traditional Christianity. Evidence is brought in afterwards, as window dressing.
 * Jonathan Wells, Why Darwinism is Doomed, 2006.

 * Science follows the evidence wherever it leads, but Darwinism does not. So the present controversy over evolution is not a war between science and religion. It is primarily a war between Darwinism and evidence--and the evidence will win.
 * Jonathan Wells, The Problem Of Evidence, 2009.

 * I experience the same sense of absurdity when I listen to a cosmologist like Stephen Hawking telling us that the universe began with a big bang fifteen billion years ago, and that physics will shortly create a 'theory of everything' that will answer every possible question about our universe; this entails the corollary that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Then I think of the day when I suddenly realized that I did not know where space ended, and it becomes obvious that Hawking is also burying his head in the sand. God may be an unnecessary hypothesis for all I know, and I do not have the least objection to Hawking dispensing with him, but until we can understand why there is existence rather than nonexistence, then we simply have no right to make such statements. It is unscientific. The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter. I feel that he is trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it does not exist.
 * Colin Wilson (1998) Alien Dawn pp. 301-302

title: Darwinism


text:
User talk:Psychonaut

--Aphaia 22:17, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:Psychonaut


text:
User talk:Aphaia/User page draft

I looked briefly at your 1st draft. Thank you for your effort. First thing I'd like to mention is the wikipedia corresponding link, for comparison, here: w:Wikipedia:User page. I don't see any substantive reason why wikiquote and wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project) should have different userpage policies, but still, if we come up with good ideas here as a result of our experience in wikiquote, we can suggest them for wikipedia too. In fact, if the single login proposal would be implemented in an ideal way, then users would have one userpage for all wikimedia projects, and one list with all of their editing contributions on a single page, etc. (this, btw, would destroy my argument that en.wikiquote userpages should be primarily in English). But not sure if that's likely, and it's far off anyway. I also notice that the wikipedia page has discussion, but they don't touch the foreign languages issue specifically anywhere, it seems. Or perhaps they do somewhere else, and I didn't find it. Anyway, with regard to your draft, generally it's good imho, but perhaps a choice of certain words can lead to different emphasis. When you use the word "freespace", perhaps some users would take it to mean something stronger than what you intended. Sams 22:54, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your feedback and complement. I forgot to check Wikipedia policy page. I'll give a look. And it is interesting they don't mention to foreign language issue. Perhaps it is written elsewhere or a sort of "unwritten rules".
 * And I appreciate you to remind me your argument. Do you mind if I write "some editors have a strong opinion, as for user page (and perhaps talk page) of English Wikiquote too, not only on articles, every content should be written in English, because English is only the language which all readers can understand"? (too strong perhaps, and your modification will be welcome). Or more briefly, because I think it would be someday helpful our policy reflects past (and well discussed) arguments.
 * As for "Freespace", hmmm do you have any recomendation?
 * And all above, if you prefer, please edit the draft itself too;-) Be bold. --Aphaia 23:59, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Aphaia, I've done some significant copyediting, as you requested. I hope I managed to preserve your intent without introducing my own opinions (yet). I did expand on a couple of points: I hope you find the changes useful. — Jeff Q (talk) 02:48, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I explained why the editing-only-user-page pattern is considered suspicious, which a new editor wouldn't necessarily understand.
 * In "User's own quotes", I had a hard time rephrasing the "your own favorite quotes" text. Your intent, I think, is to say that we don't want someone named Joe Nobody to create a "Joe Nobody" page that says "Here are my favorite quotes", but we don't to imply that Joe can't create a page like "William Shakespeare" that starts with only his favorite Shakespeare quotes. (Of course, W.S. already exists, but you get the idea.)
 * I didn't edit your "En-0" comment because it appears to be a personal observation.
 * I appreciate your copyediting. En-0 remark is subjective, and not based on observation of our project itself, though there are actually some editors who concentrate creating interlang links, but it is unknown if they speak English or not, so I think it would be better to point out only potential cases. But logocally we cannot expect every editor has English competence enough communicate sufficiently (and thank you for your patience for my tweaks and bad English, one of my American friend confessed once he couldn't sometimes understand what I wanted to mean.) In another aspect, En-0 comment is a bit unclear for us, because currently we haven't imported Babel template to our project yet.
 * Perhaps "user page utilities" can be much expanded. Self-introduction is one of main function and useful aspect not directly for editing but for building up the community (and finally to constructive editing). This section could be suggestive and informative.
 * Proposal of new sections and contents, or trimming will be appreciated. --Aphaia 05:36, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Language issues
I moved the following here from the page, because it was a bit too "talkative" and less "policish". I rewrote, losing much of the text, so I am keeping it here. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 18:25, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

We start from two facts:
 * 1) English Wikiquote is a English-language project, and English is therefore its lingua franca. In other words, every editor is expected to be able to communicate in English to some extent.
 * 2) English is however not the mother tongue of all English Wikiquote editors. Some editors communicate more frequently in (and feel more comfortable with) other languages.

Consequently, some editors doubt if every contributor can communicate in English. On our sibling project English Wikipedia we find many En-0 editors who don't speak or very hesitate to speak in English. It is therefore alogical and unfriendly to force every editor to write only in English, specially on their user page which they can use in the way they like basically, and sometimes would like to write down their personal remarks (like "Todo-list"). Some non-native English speakers may prefer to write in other languages on their user pages. This raises the possibility that no one but the users themselves can understand what is written.

So, the suggested attitudes are:
 * Every language is welcome.
 * English is, however, the main language of this project.
 * As a kindness toward other editors, if you write in a language other than English, it is recommended that you add some English notice or title, like "To-do list" (perhaps followed by "To-do list" in another language). Another compromise might be a note "Some parts of this page are written in (your language)".
 * People are expected to communicate here in English, but it isn't mandatory. Embassy and Wikimedia Embassy could help you in some situations. (Someday we can say "you could be help in any language" hopefully, but it'll take time).
 * If you can speak other languages than English, we invite you to list yourself on the Embassy list.

title: User talk:Aphaia/User page draft


text: User talk:67.136.15.187

title: User talk:67.136.15.187


text:
Susan Sarandon

Susan Abigail Sarandon (née Tomalin; born October 4, 1946) is an Academy Award winning American actress and activist.

Quote

 * Kind of like the difference between making love and masturbation, I'd say.
 * Responding to the question "What to you is the difference between stage and film?" in Inside the Actors Studio, Season 4, Episode 13 (aired November 15, 1998)

 * It's great to see people who find joy in service and don't close their eyes and aren't afraid.
 * "'The Power of One' : Interview with Susan Sarandon" at Belief.net

 * Religion is not black and white. It's much more complicated. Spirituality is much bigger than that. God is much bigger than that. I don't believe in a wrathful God. I believe he's much more forgiving and inclusive than some religions. The things that are done in her name or his name are horrible.
 * "'The Power of One' : Interview with Susan Sarandon" at Belief.net

 * Every relationship starts out with a dream of what you think it's going to be, and you either have the tool kit when you get to the hard spots where you'll make it through, or you need to move on.
 * As quoted in "Susan Sarandon On 'Jeff Who Lives At Home'" The Daily Beast (March 16, 2012)

title: Susan Sarandon


text:
User talk:Cigarette~enwikiquote

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Cigarette. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Cigarette~enwikiquote that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 23:20, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 05:44, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Cigarette~enwikiquote


text:
User:Cigarette~enwikiquote

You can find me at Wikipedia, too.

title: User:Cigarette~enwikiquote


text:
User talk:24.87.242.0

I want to thank the Wikiquotian using this IP address for the many titles added to List of films, and for how they take care to add them in alphabetical order, which many people don't think to do. But I'd like to ask two more favors of them, to conform to LoF practice: We don't have many guidelines written down, mainly because it seems easier to get casual editors to pick them up by osmosis than to get them to read a long laundry list of formatting issues in the Notes section at the bottom. But following these guidelines will make it a bit easier to maintain the list and the resulting article titles. Thank you for your assistance. — Jeff Q (talk) 01:39, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Please add a title like The Aviator in the following format:
 * 2) * Aviator, The
 * This gives the resulting article the correct title while making it appear in the list in a manner easier to sort.
 * 1) Please check IMDb to get a canonical form of the film title. Our practice for English-titled films is to use their listed primary title.

title: User talk:24.87.242.0


text: User talk:200.115.223.147

title: User talk:200.115.223.147


text:
Talk:Robert Wilson Lynd

Wikipedia points to two Robert Lynds, and I am not sure which one is meant here. If anyone knows, disambiguating would be nice. MosheZadka 06:58, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Robert Lynd may be

 * Robert Staughton Lynd the sociologist
 * Robert Wilson Lynd the essayist

 * More research landed this in the lap of RWL. Enjoy! ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 13:17, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Which, if any, Robert Lynd said this?
"In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence" is frequently attributed to a Robert Lynd. It sounds an appropriate metaphor for the sociologist observing "Middletown", but the 'net appears to adopt it literally and it's in the avian sections of quotes! Did either Lynd say or write it, if so where? [Added by 203.51.103.134]

 * I found the source of this—Robert Wilson Lynd—and included it on the main page. I have not removed this section because it contains somewhat more than just the quote. --Hughh (talk) 02:46, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

 * The 'Net is lousy with unsourced quotations. I just corrected one site that thought the "short decisive war" quote was from the sociologist. You can almost never get sources (and rarely accurate quotes) from quote websites, which is why we're so focused on sourcing and verifying quotes here. I'm hoping to find out a little more about the essayist's quotes shortly; I may find something out about the sociologist in the process. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 12:30, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Unsourced

 * There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

 * I am a confirmed believer in blessings in disguise. I prefer them undisguised when I myself happen to be the person blessed; in fact, I can scarcely recognize a blessing in disguise except when it is bestowed upon someone else.

 * It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf.

title: Talk:Robert Wilson Lynd


text:
User talk:61.229.142.233

Hi. I moved the quote of Winston Churchill you added to "attributed" from "verified". While I have heard it attributed to him, I do not have source information. If you have such information, please add it and move it back. Thanks for your contribution to Wikiquote! MosheZadka 07:26, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Is this some sort of chat page? Anyway, I don't have any proof either. 61.229.142.233 07:54, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

 * Yes, this is the best way to get messages to users, due to the "New Messages" feature (which I assume you clicked and found this). Churchill, unfortunately, is one of those figures to whom all kinds of quotes are attributed, so extra care must be taken with proper attribution in this case. If you intend to continue to contribute to Wikiquote, may I humbly suggest you create an account? You don't have to, but it makes some things easier (such as being certain messages arrive at you and not at some dynamic-ip user). BTW, it is strongly encouraged, even if you do not register, to sign entries on talk pages. Use ~ to automatically sign with IP and date (or username and date, once you register). Thanks for your consideration, MosheZadka 07:48, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I will be holding onto this dynamically allocated IP until such time as my machine is rebooted. My editing days will be over before that. I added another Churchill quote about alcohol. Also no real source. Thanks for the signature tip. Was wondering about that. 61.229.142.233 07:54, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:61.229.142.233


text:
User talk:66.27.182.21

Hi. I reverted your deletion of a quote from the Socrates page. If deleting it was intentional, rather than an accidental edit, please feel free to explain why you chose to delete it in your next entry. Please notice that if a quote is popularly misattributed, it is better to add a "misattributed" section, add the quote there and remark on the history of the misattribution. This way the quote will not get added again when someone finds it attributed, and wikiquote gains even more information regarding famous quotations. Thanks for your consideration, MosheZadka 07:53, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:66.27.182.21


text:
Talk:Andy Warhol

I think that your work is amazing!

The source of the "Catalogue of an exhibition of his art in Stockholm, Sweden (1968)" is curious. This exhibition included a bunch of "fake" Andy Warhol Brillo boxes. Doesn't this call the source of the quote into question? --Lefou23 03:01, 27 February 2008 (UTC) --194.80.20.10 11:34, 14 March 2008 (UTC) bababababaa

I think that the "15 minutes of fame" quote is wrong. According to the trivia book This Book, what he actually said was, "In the future, there won't be any more stars. TV will be so accessible that everybody will be a star for 15 minutes." 70.144.95.100 16:54, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Unsourced

 * Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

 * The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will.

 * you take some chocolate ... and you take two pieces of bread ... and you put the candy in the middle and you make a sandwich of it. and that would be a cake.

 * An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

 * Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

 * During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

 * Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

 * Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible.

 * I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.

 * I am a deeply superficial person.

 * I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

 * I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

 * I keep reading about this, erm, Indian guy that turns out like three or four thousand pictures a minute...or maybe it's a day.

 * I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.

 * I just think any picture you take is a good picture.

 * I like boring things.

 * I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

 * I met someone on the street who said wasn't it great that we're going to have a movie star for president, that it was so Pop, and (laughs) when you think about it like that, it is great, it's so American.

 * I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.

 * I never read. I just look at pictures.

 * I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say "figment".

 * I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

 * I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screening,so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else.

 * I went to China, I didn't want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really, really, really great.

 * I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, "Well, what do you love most?" That's how I started painting money.

 * I'll endorse with my name any of the following; clothing AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK N' ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY!!

 * I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

 * I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.

 * I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

 * If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

 * Isn't life just a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

 * It doesn't matter if it displays Mona Lisa, a Banana or Hans Rittman's glasses - the fact is it must be pop!

 * It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

 * People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don't look and it's magic.

 * Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

 * My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

 * People are only glamorous if you don't see them. Like the movies used to make people years ago. There is something about people on screen that makes them so special; when you see them in person, they are so different and the whole illusion is gone.

 * The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

 * When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

 * Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

 * Art is what you can get away with.

 * I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts.

title: Talk:Andy Warhol