“As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.”
quotations
from Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes
“you can’t walk away
without getting scarred.”
Clarence Darrow on other people’s opinions
“I have suffered much from being misunderstood. But I would have suffered more if I was understood.”
from Newspaper Days by H.L. Mencken
“When A annoys or injuries B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”
from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
“He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known since childhood.”
translated by Michael Henry Heim
Tennessee Williams on Hollywood
In the 1940s I had a glorious time in Hollywood because I was fired almost at once from the project I was working on and they had to continue to pay me. That was in my contract. For six months they had to pay me $250 a week. This was in 1943, when $250 was equivalent to about $1,000 now, I would guess. They had to pay me whether I had an assignment or not.
First they put me on Marriage Is a Private Affair for Lana Turner. Well, they expressed great delight with my dialogue, and I think it was good. But they said, “You give Miss Turner too many multisyllable words!” So I said, “Well some words do contain more than one syllable!” And Pandro Berman, who loved me very much–Lana Turner just happened to be his girlfriend at the time–he said to me, “Tennessee, Lana can tackle two syllables, but I’m afraid if you go into three you’re taxing her vocabulary!”
Then they asked me if I’d like to write a screenplay for a child star, one named Margaret O’Brien. I said, “I’d sooner shoot myself!” By that time I knew I’d get the $250 regardless.
So I lived out in Santa Monica and had a ball until the money ran out.
from The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Tom: “You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?”
on books by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
a Chinese proverb
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Leonard Durso 