Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.

Ivo Andric, The Bridge Over The Drina.

…such moments of social upset and great inevitable change usually throw up just such men, unbalanced and incomplete, to turn things inside out or lead them astray. That is one of the signs of times of disorder.

Ivo Andric, The Bridge Over The Drina.

So, on the kapia, between the skies, the river and the hills, generation after generation learnt not to mourn overmuch what the troubled waters had borne away. They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured “like the bridge on the Drina.”

Ivo Andric, The Bridge Over The Drina.

You, children, be zealous for the
beautiful gifts of the
violetlapped Muses
and for the clear songloving lyre.

But my skin once soft is now
taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.

And my heart is weighed down
and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as
fawns.

I groan for this. But what can I
do?
A human being without old age is
Not a possibility.

There is the story of Tithonos,
loved by Dawn with her arms
of roses
and she carried him off to the
ends of the earth

when he was beautiful and young.
Even so was he gripped
by white old age. He still has his
deathless wife.

Sappho, Fragment 58, translated by Anne Carson (NYRB, October 20, 2005)

I am nothing by myself. I am something only when mixed with others.

A principle of science recently rediscovered.

What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely.

Haruki Murakami, in the New Yorker of September 26, 2005.

You must always be careful in the jungle. I listen to my dreams. If I have a dream of danger, then I stay in the village. Many accidents happen to white people because they don’t believe their dreams.

Vajuvi, of the Kalapalo people of the Brazilian Amazon as quoted in the New Yorker of September 19, 2005.

God has given me this swan song to see if I am - to see if I am up to it.

Dr. Minyard, elected coroner of Orleans Parish.

Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils...

Rebecca West, speaking of Europe in 1937 (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

We prune our minds to fit them into the garden of ordinary life. We exclude from our consciousness all sorts of knowledge that we have acquired because it might distract us from the problems we must solve if we are to go on living, and it might even make us doubt whether it is prudent to live. But sometimes it is necessary for us to know where we are in eternity as well as time, and we must lift this ban. Then we must let our full knowledge invade our minds, and let our memories of birth crawl like serpents from their cave and our foreknowledge of death spread its wide shadow.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

The woman a man loves is in a sense his soul, or at any rate the answer to the call it makes.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

All women believe that some day something supremely agreeable will happen, and that afterwards the whole of life will be supremely agreeable. All men believe that some day they will do something supremely disagreeable, and that afterwards life will move on so exalted a plane that all considerations of the agreeable and disagreeable will prove petty and superfluous.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

It is not pleasant to admit that we know almost nothing, so little that, for lack of knowledge, our actions are wild and foolish. It is not pleasant to be bound to the task of learning all our days, to be under the obligation to go on learning even though it involves making acquaintance with pain, although we know that we must die still in ignorance. To do these things it is necessary to have faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown, to cast away all the acquisitions and certainties which would ensure a comfortable existence lest they should impede us on a journey which may never be accomplished, which never even offers comfort.


Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

[W}e live in an uncomprehended universe, and...it is urgently necessary for sensitive men to look at each phenomenon in turn and find out what it is and what are its relations to the rest of existence. (Dubrovnik II)

He offered himself wholly to each event in order that he might learn in full what revelation it had to make about the nature of the universe. (Sarajevo VII)

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

You think you'll never get it right,
But you know that you might.

Misheard somewhere.

Carelessness and cruelty ... infects any power when it governs a people not its own without safeguarding itself by giving the subjects the largest possible amount of autonomy.

It seem very probable that Rome was able to conquer foreign territories because she had developed her military genius at the expense of precisely those qualities which would have made her able to rule them.


Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

[Mussolini's] offence is that he made himself dictator without binding himself by any of the contractual obligations which civilized man has imposed on his rulers in all creditable phases of history and which give power a soul to be saved.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

It is the habit of the people, whenever an old man mismanages his business so that it falls to pieces as soon as he dies, to say, "Ah, So-and-so was a marvel! He kept things together so long as he was alive, and look what happens now he has gone."

Rebecca West speaking about Emperor Franz Josef in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

....

[A} cynic [is] a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
And a sentimentalist…is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.

Oscar Wilde, Act III, Lady Windermere’s Fan