Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
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Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgement may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. 'Quod scripsi scripsi' said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. 'What I have written I have Written.' We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgement of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.
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The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.
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If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
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Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
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The path to success is to take massive, determined action.
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The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to ...
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As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.
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He felt that it would be dull times in Dublin, when they should have no usurping government to abuse, no Saxon Parliament to upbraid, no Engli...
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As I started with her out of the city warmly enveloped in buffalo furs, I could not but think how nice it would be to drive on and on, so that...
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A new and terrible aristocracy was growing up among them,—the aristocracy of hidden firearms.
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Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
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The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little -- or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.
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By 2010, Africa could be providing the United States with as many oil imports as the Middle East.
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We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
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I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of bru...
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The air was clear. He seemed in ultimate peace ...
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Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
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She would love still, but she would never again be tender till her daughter should have repudiated her base,—her monstrous engagement.
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Universal manhood suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel despotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.
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Children are not soul-less, unguided creatures made for adults to manipulate like chattel. They are spirited beings, complete at every given moment and age. They have differentiated minds, specialized abilites and unique gifts that give testimony to themselves and their Creator. Children look to us for guidance. And they see us as symbols of love and hate, truth and deceit, selflessness and selfishness, and good and evil.....Children are not our subordinates. They are our co-conspiriators - breathing the same pneuma as us and contributing to a world far beyond present comprehension. Ultimately, in our webs of relationships, it is the children who will write, rewrite, and edit our scripts of life.
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Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
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It's all very well to dream of a dove that saves, Picasso's or the Pope's...
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'The 'haves' and 'have nots' can be traced back to the 'dids' and 'did nots.'
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If you believe that discrimination exists, it will.
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When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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