Archive for the ‘Memorable Lines’ Category
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Portrait by Vanessa Bell
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth – rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
From “On Being Ill,” by Virginia Woolf. First published by the Hogarth Press in 1930, now available in a facsimile edition from the Paris Press, with an introduction by Hermione Lee.
And here (thanks to Andris Taskans via Penn Kemp) is the only recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice:
Virginia Woolf on YouTube
Last but not least, some images of titles up for auction, should you have an extra $10,000 or so to spare. , Thanks to Nigel Beale for this.
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines, Virginia Woolf
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
“Good-bye,” Bingo’s parting smile seemed to say; “it’s not worth quarrelling now. You haven’t made much of a success of your time at Crossgates, have you? And I don’t suppose you’ll get on awfully well at a public school either. We made a mistake, really, in wasting our time and money on you. This kind of education hasn’t much to offer to a boy with your background and outlook. Oh, don’t think we don’t understand you! We know all about those ideas you have at the back of your head, we know you disbelieve in everything we’ve taught you, and we know you aren’t in the least grateful for all we’ve done for you. But there’s no use in bringing it all up now. We aren’t responsible for you any longer, and we shan’t be seeing you again. Let’s just admit that you’re one of our failures and part without ill feeling. And so, good-bye.”
That at least was what I read into her face. And yet how happy I was, that winter morning, as the train bore me away with the gleaming new silk tie round my neck! The world was opening before me, just a little, like a grey sky which exhibits a narrow crack of blue. A public school would be better fun than Crossgates but at bottom equally alien. In a world where the prime necessitities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly brushed hair, a charming smile, I was no good. All I had gained was breathing-space. A little quietude, a little self-indulgence, a little respite from cramming – and then, ruin. What kind of ruin I did not know: perhaps the colonies or an office stool, perhaps prison or an early death. But first a year or two in which one could “slack off” and get the benefit of one’s sins, like Doctor Faustus. It is the advantage of being thirteen that you can not only live in the moment, but do so with full consciousness, foreseeing the future and yet not caring about it.
– George Orwell, from “Such, Such Were the Joys.”
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
“Though I am alive now, I do not believe that an old man’s pessimism is truer than a young man’s optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man’s power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom. Lonely teenagers still arrive in San Francisco aboard Greyhound buses. The city can still seem, I imagine, by comparison to where they came from, paradise.
Four years ago, on a Sunday in winter, a brilliant spring afternoon, I was jogging near Fort Point while overhead a young woman was, with difficulty, climbing over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. Holding down her skirt with one hand, with the other she waved to a startled spectator (the newspaper next day quoted a workman who was painting the bridge) before she stepped onto the sky.
To land like a spilled purse at my feet.”
– Richard Rodriguez, From “Late Victorians.”
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memoir, Memorable Lines
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Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
“A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.”
– Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels.”
Photo by Phyllis Rose
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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Monday, July 13th, 2009
“Except for one mound with a clump of cherry laurels over-shadowed by a maidenhair tree – whose skate-shaped leaves I used to give to my school friends to press between the pages of their atlases – the whole warm garden basked in a yellow light that shimmered into red and violet; but whether this red and violet sprang then, and still spring, from feelings of happiness or from dazzled sight, I could not tell. Those were summers when the heat quivered up from the hot yellow gravel and pierced the plaited rushes of my wide-brimmed hats, summers almost without nights. For even then I so loved the dawn that my mother granted it to me as a reward. She used to agree to wake me at half past three and off I would go, an empty basket on each arm, toward the kitchen gardens that sheltered in the narrow bend of the river, in search of strawberries, black currents, and hairy gooseberries.
At half past three, everything slumbered still in a primal blue, blurred and dewy, and as I went down the sandy road the mist, grounded by its own weight, bathed first my legs, then my well-built little body, reaching at last to my mouth and ears, and finally to that most sensitive part of all, my nostrils. I went alone, for there were no dangers in that freethinking countryside. It was on that road and at that hour that I first became aware of my own self, experienced in an inexpressible state of grace, and felt one with the first breath of air that stirred, the first bird, and the sun so newly born that it still looked not quite round.”
Colette, from Earthly Paradise
Colette, Irving Penn, 1951 /IRVING PENN/CONDE NAST
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