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Everybody would like their work in the world to be according to the measure of their abilities in a particular direction, in that which is most suited to their individuality. But what is that? That is where I stand, like Hercules, but not at the parting of the ways--no, here there is a far greater number of ways and it is correspondingly difficult to choose the right one. The misfortune of my life is perhaps that I am interested in far too many things and not decidedly in some one thing; my interests are not all subordinated to one thing but are all co-ordinated.

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Most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most people have a job too small for our spirit.

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MM “Did we give up our hypothesis? Heavens no. After all, it had only been disconfirmed four times.”

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“I would hardly have been worth much myself if I had only one purpose in life.”

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What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape? Jailers.

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Narrator:
Would you rather work retail or drive a nail through your hand?
Too Much Coffee Man:
What kind of nail?

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Men who love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things, indeed.

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“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”

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Roger [Zelazny] was as kind and generous as any man I have ever known. He was the best kind of company. Often quiet, but always interesting. Sometimes it seemed that he had read every book ever printed. He knew something about everything and everything about some things, but he never used his knowledge to impress or intimidate. In an age where everyone is a specialist, Roger was the last Renaissance man, fascinated by the world and all that’s in it, capable of talking about Doc Savage and Proust with equal expertise and enthusiasm.

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“No. You’re stupid and silly and romantic, and you deserve to be miserable all your life. What sort of a world do you think you’re living in? You’re only fit to mix with Gods and fairies. You don’t stand a chance in the real world.”

MM “All lives are composed of two basic elements,” the squirrel said, “purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in your flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain—this is nothing beside a life without poetry.”

#
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but in the end it is the journey that matters, not the end.

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15 This stream affords some rich vallies of cultivateable land and the Bluffs are made of fine lime rock with some good timber and numerous springs of clear cool water. here I observed the grave of Mrs Sarah Keyes agead 70 yares who had departed this life in may last. at her feet stands the stone that gives this information. This stone shews us that allages and all sects are found to undertake this long tedious and even dangerous Journey for some unknown object never to be satisfied never at rest allways on the strech for something new some strange novelty.

Backoff, man. I’m a scientist.

...any view of things that is not strange is false...

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out, and difficult.

Do not multiply entities without necessity.

Do not multiply entities without necessity.

Beware especially of theories.

 Degas:
What a business! My whole day gone on a blasted sonnet, without getting an inch further...and it isn’t ideas I’m short of...I’m full of them, I’ve got too many...

 Mallarmé:
But Degas, you can’t make a poem with ideas—you make it with words!

Make things as simple as possible—but no simpler.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject. The actual enemy is the unknown.

Chaos and complexity are the first steps toward the mystery of a subject. The actual enemy is the unknown.

Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts.

Practicing principles matters more than proving them.

Poetry is the excitement produced by the unexpected becoming the inevitable. But in poetry of the past, though there was much of the inevitable, there was sometimes little of the unexpected; while in poetry today, though there is plenty of the unexpected, sometimes there is no inevitability at all.

yJa: You appear to be injured.
VvG: This? Yesterday, I was trying to complete a self-portrait. I just couldn’t get the ear right, so I cut it off; threw it away. The sun compels me to paint. I can’t waste time talking to you.

#
C: What is your work?
JB: I write poems, I translate. I believe...
C: There will be no I believe. Stand straight! Don’t lean on the wall. Look at the Court. Answer the Court as directed! Now, do you have full-time work?
JB: I thought that I had full-time work, yes.
C: Answer precisely!
JB: I wrote poems. I thought that they would be published. I believe...
C: We are not interested in “I believe.” Answer: why were you not working?
JB: I worked. I wrote poems.
C: This does not interest us. We are interested in what firm you were connected to.
JB: I had agreements with a publishing house.
C: Did your contract provide you with enough to feed yourself? Name them: provide dates, sums.
JB: I don’t remember precisely. My lawyer has the contracts.
C: I am asking you.
JB: In Moscow, two books of my translations were published.
C: What is your work experience?
JB: More or less...
C: We are not interested in “more or less.”
JB: Five years.
C: Where did you work?
JB: In a factory. With geological expeditions...
C: And in general, what is your specialty?
JB: Poet. Poet and translator.
C: And who deigned that you are a poet? Who put you in the ranks of the poets?
JB: Nobody. Who put me in the ranks of mankind?
C: Did you study for this?
JB: Study for what?
C: To become a poet. You never tried to finish college where they prepare... where they study...
JB: I didn’t think that this was a matter of education.
C: How is that?
JB: I thought... well, I thought it came from God.

#
What I have to say to you is very simple; so simple that I find it hard to say. It is that poetry is getting something right in language, that this idea of rightness in language is in the first place a feeling, which does not in the least prevent it from existing; if it is subjective, which I doubt, it is not ‘merely subjective’ (as students say, and o dear how often they say it); that this feeling of rightness has largely been lost, if not eagerly assaulted with destructive intent, by people who if they ever wake up are going to find it extremely hard to recapture or even to remember what that feeling was.

#

Good, it’s supposed to be—Make it as personal as you can. Believe me, you can’t imagine a feeling everyone hasn’t had. Make it personal, tell the truth, and then write “Burn this” on it.

A man with so firm a faith in the meaning of words should not listen to poetry.

In art, truth that is boring is not true.

MM But where else can [evoking emotion] come from? If not in art, where is there room for sharing the hurts of the world, and spreading them out a little and so take some of the sting away? If an artist can’t do it, no one can.
MM If an artist can’t do it, he’s no artist.
MM Bones?

#
MM For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.
MM ...—it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.

#
MM This ends our inquiry. The question, “Ought things to be signed?” seems, if not an easy question, at all events an isolated one, but we could not answer it without considering what words are, and disentangling the dual elements they contain. We decided pretty easily that information ought to be signed: common sense leads us to that conclusion, and newspapers, which are largely unsigned, have gained by that device their undesirable influence over civilization. Creation—that we found a more difficult matter. “Literature wants not to be signed,” I suggested. Creation comes from the depths—the mystic will tell you, from God. The signature, the name, belongs to the surface-personality, and pertains to the world of information; it is a ticket, not the spirit of life. While the author wrote, he forgot his name; while we read him, we forget both his name and our own.

#

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MM Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

#

  GIRL
I’m going up too.
(She starts upstairs; BILL starts to pick up the books. Preoccupied.)
Don’t you put those away; I’m not finished with those.
(BILL looks off after her, aching.)
 
  APRIL
(Snaps her fingers lightly at him. One. Two. Three. Four.)
Hey. Hey.
 
  BILL
Come on, April; knock it off. (He sits at the switchboard.)
 
  APRIL
Bill, baby, you know what your trouble is? You’ve got Paul Grangeritis. You’ve not got the conviction of your passions.

#
If she looks back, that means she’s interested. Come on, now, give me a little look. A little glance back. Give me that smug look and be on your way.

MM “Any woman can weep without tears,” she answered over her shoulder, “and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that’s riddle enough.”

We were both silent for a little, and then he looked at me with a direct, gentle gaze. His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak.

#
“‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’”

MM “Is there another way to win a maiden?” he asked earnestly. “Molly, do you know another way? Will you tell it to me?” He leaned across the table to seize her hand. “I like being brave well enough, but I will be a lazy coward again if you think that would be better. The sight of her makes me want to do battle with all evil and ugliness, but it also makes me want to sit still and be unhappy. What should I do, Molly?”

#

“...This isn’t opera, this is life, why should love always be tragic? Burn this.”

[She holds him back.] What about our relationship?
[Distracted.] Hm? [Snorts.] Fuck that.
You little shit! I’m glad I tortured you!

#
MM Women, he could only conclude, extrapolating from his own experience up to this December day, were naturally polygamous, whatever the common wisdom said to the contrary; able to love deeply and forever for a while, to go off suddenly and spectacularly in all directions like one of those immense fireworks that eject a globe of stars as solid as can be, which hangs in the colored night for an eternity, a brief eternity, the length of an awed exhalation from the spectators, and then goes out as though it had never been. And men (take himself, for a single example) were naturally monogamous, bound by the literal meaning of the promises they made and the actual endurance of the forever those promises contained. En ciel un dieu, en terre une déese , as the old Provençal poets put it.

A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.

#
“Down Boy”
I’ve been going out with this guy for about three weeks. Problem is, he’s obviously taking this relationship a lot more seriously than I am. He always tells me he loves me, and I tell him I don’t see how. We talk on the phone every day for hours, but I’m not ready for all that mushy stuff. How do I make him back off and give me some breathing room? Help! Smothered in NJ
Right now, when he talks to you, he’s really just talking to himself. Stars are in his eyes. Later, when he finds out how dumb and self-centered you are, he’ll learn to hate you. It shouldn’t take long.

#

#
The cure for loneliness is solitude.

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“The greatest good luck in life, for anybody, is to have something that means everything to you... to do what you want to do, and to find that people will pay you for doing it... if it’s unattainable. It’s no good having an objective that’s attainable! That’s the big thing: you have an ideal, an objective, and that objective is unreachable....”

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She looked as if she were telling the truth, though with women, especially blue-eyed women, that doesn’t always mean anything.

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MM “The market,”, says Mister Johnson, “is like a beautiful woman—endlessly fascinating endlessly complex, always changing, always mystifying. I have been absorbed and immersed since 1924 and I know this is no science. It is an art. Now we have computers and all sorts of statistics, but the market is still the same and understanding the market is still no easier. It is personal intuition, sensing patterns of behavior. There is always something unknown, undiscerned. ”

#
In the great shuffle of transmitted characteristics, traits, abilities, aptitudes, the man who fixes on something definite in life that he must do, at the expense of everything else, if necessary, has presumably got something that, for him, should be recognized as the Inner Fire. For him, that is the Gleam, the Vision and the Word! He’d better follow it. The greatest adventure he’ll ever have on this side is following where it leads.

#

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When you meet a master swordsman, show him your sword. When you meet a man who is not a poet, do not show him your poem.

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While Pierce read, his old teacher Frank Walker Barr at Noate stood up before his senior seminar on the History of History, and talking as he worked, opened the classroom windows; for the rain that was ceasing in the Faraways had passed from here too, and the sun was hot.
MM“What, then, grants meaning to historical acounts?” he asked, for the last time in that semester. “What is the difference between a history and a register of facts, of names and events?” He had taken from the corner a long oaken pole, with a brass finger on the end of it; this he was inserting into the brass sockets set for it in the frames of the windows, and drawing them down. Many in the classroom remembered grade-school teachers doing the same, in past classrooms, and they watched Barr with interest.
MM“What we might do to conclude,” Barr went on, “is to try to think how meaning arises in other kinds of accounts or narratives.” The finger engaged the hole of the last westward-facing window. “It seems to me that what grants meaning in folktales and legendary narratives—we’re thinking now of something like the Nebelungenliedor the Mort D’Arthur—is not logical development so much as the thematic repetition, the same ideas or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances.”
MMThe window he tugged at yielded, and slid open, admitting a crowd of breezes which had been pressing for admittance there.
MM“A hero sets out,” Barr said, not turning back to his students but facing the sparkling quad and the air. “To find a treasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches, isthe treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden, repeated in different forms, like a set of nesting boxes —each of them however just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enought to seem at last to have been really told. Not uncommonly in old romances the story just breaks off then, or turns to other matters.
MM“Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions, or inherent in the story’s premises—logical completion as a vehicle of meaning—all that is later, not necessarily later in time, but belonging to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works, like The Faerie Queene, which set up for themselves a titanic plot, an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it: never need to finish it, because they are at heart works of the older kind, and the pattern has already arisen satisfyingly within them, the flavor is already there.
MM“So is this any help in our thinking? Is meaning in history like the solution to an equation, or like a repeated flavor—is it to be solved for, or tasted?”
MMHe turned to face them.
MM“Is this a parable? Have I simply repeated our seminar in another form?”
MMThe air in the room had all been changed now for the air outside, burdened with June, whatever that was exactly, something heavier than warmth or odor or vapor. It was the last day of classes.
MM“No?” he said, regarding their mild faces, absent already, and no wonder either. “Yes? No? Maybe?”

The Delphian does not speak out, nor does it hide: it signifies.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

#
Curse those evil octopi.

#
A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Be suspicious of convention. Take charge of your own thinking. Rouse yourself from the ruse of unexamined habit.

Tzu-lu: If the duke of Wei called you to administer his country, what would be your first act?
Kung-fu Tse: The reform of language.

[And why is that?]
All wisdom in rooted in learning to call things by the right name.