The Last Word

Friday, February 10, 2006

As was his language so was his life.
—Seneca

I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
—Evelyn Waugh

My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop. I exist by what I think and I can’t prevent myself from thinking.
—Jean-Paul Sartre

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justifications in every line.
—Joseph Conrad

A weary, weary time tarrying here / Beneath the walls of Troy me have you kept, but from this hour / Alive you shall not keep me.
—Sophocles

Would that the Roman people had a single neck.
—Caligula

The delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefiting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there, is a necessary component of the expansionist cause. More will mean worse.
—Kingsley Amis

I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.
—Henry James

Man’s life is brief, and none can purchase more. But fame lives on, if men live, as men should, by courage.
—Vergil

No opera plot can be sensible, for in sensible situations people do not sing. An opera plot must be, in both sense of the word, a melodrama.
—W. H. Auden

Christ follows Dionysius
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban cats out Ariel.
—Ezra Pound

Beauty in things exist in the mind which contemplates them.
—David Hume

Unless you believe, you will not understand.
—Saint Augustine

Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
—Lewis Carroll

In men of the highest character and noblest genius there is to be found an insatiable desire for honor, command, power, and glory.
—Cicero

Agrippina had long decided on murder.
—Tacitus

Now as I was young and easy under the apple’ bough
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was’ green.
—Dylan Thomas

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
—Jacques Derrida

An artist has no need to express his mind directly in his work for it to express the quality of that mind; it has indeed been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
—Marcel Proust

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.
—Pablo Picasso

And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

California is a queer place—in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.
—D.H. Lawrence

With this I have said all that I thought the reader would wish me to explain. Nothing now remains but to find him—to find the reader, that is.
—Erich Auerbach

The Last Word

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