Category: Quotable

“Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”

“Oh, no,” said Dr. Dorian. “I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”

—E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, chap. XIV

Above all, the student should cultivate the scientific attitude of mind, and he should never believe in his infallibility. The beginner’s notebook is all question marks. The student who is beginning to know birds really well often has no question marks. The notebook of the trained ornithologist always has many question marks, until death closes the notebook.

—Ludlow Griscom, “Problems of Field Identification” (1922)

One of the connections I did not make in the Wikipedia article for Ludlow Griscom that I am expanding is his dislike of Texas ornithologist H. C. Oberholser. I have transcribed many of Oberholser’s migration cards as part of the Bird Phenology Project. Griscom butted heads with a lot of his colleagues; I don’t think that he and I would have got along. But this zinger, quoted in William E. Davis, Jr, Davis, Dean of the Birdwatchers: A Biography of Ludlow Griscom (1994), is too good to keep to myself. It’s from a letter to Guy Emerson in 1943:

I happen to have known Oberholser very well indeed over a long period of years. While I have every esteem for him as an ornithologist, as a man and a human being he is a mean spirited hypocrite and, in spite of his scientific distinction, got himself detested by every ornithologist in the United States. For years his colleagues in the National Museum and the Biological Survey looked forward with keen anticipation to the happy day when he would finally reach the retiring age, and all of them would enjoy writing a sonofobituary address. (p. 150)

It was a dense white summer day and there were men in orange vests jackhammering along the middle of the broad street, with concrete barriers rimming the raw crevice and every moving thing on either side taking defensive measures, taxis in stop-and-start pattern and pedestrians sprinting across the street in stages, in tactical bursts, cell phones welded to their heads.

—Don DeLillo, “The Starveling”

The cardinal grosbeak, or Virginia redbird, is quite common in the same localities, though more inclined to seek the woods. It is much sought after by bird-fanciers, and by boy gunners, and consequently is very shy. This bird suggests a British redcoat; his heavy, pointed beak, his high cockade, the black stripe down his face, the expression of weight and massiveness about his head and neck, and his erect attitude, give him a decided, soldier-like appearance; and there is something of the tone of the fife in his song or whistle, while his ordinary note, when disturbed, is like the clink of a sabre.

—John Burroughs, “Spring at the Capital,” from Wake-Robin (1871)

 

I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land. Signatures of course differ, whether written with axe or pen, and this is as it should be.

—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, “Axe-in-Hand”

“But to-day, for instance, Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity.”

“National, I think it must have been,” observed Louisa.

“Yes, it was.—But isn’t it the same?” [Sissy] timidly asked.

“You had better say, National, as he said so,” returned Louisa, with her dry reserve.

“National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?”

“What did you say?” asked Louisa.

“Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,” said Sissy, wiping her eyes.

“That was a great mistake of yours,” observed Louisa.

—Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854), book 1, ch. IX

When I was young, I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

—W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938), quoted in The Sun no. 431 (November 2011)

Demented is different to drunk. I think people get demented the same way they get annoying. The thing you don’t like about them just gets worse, until one day you find that’s all there is left of them — the fuss and the show of it — the actual person has snuck out the back and gone home.

—Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz, “Save the Last Dance for Me,” p. 194

“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns that he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce—produce—produce! That’s what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class.”

—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922), chap. II

As I was saying: we have come/ (or are we still going?) to a/ point where it is necessary to/ speak at cross purposes with what/ we are saying. It is because what-/ ever we were saying so failed to/ hit the mark. Now at last we know that/ saying one thing requires saying/ the opposite in order to keep the/ whole statement from being like/ a Hollywood set. Perhaps it would/ be better to be silent, but a) someone/ else would be speaking; and b) it/ wouldn’t keep us from going and we/ would continue doing what we/ are doing.

—John Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961), collected in Silence

Mom (seeing me making slides): “Again?”

Me: “So?”

Mom: “Why not try writing for a change?”

Me: “Excuse me, this is my slide journal.”

Mom: “I mean writing a paper.”

Me: “Ugh! Who even uses that word?”

Mom: “I see a lot of white. Where does the writing come in?”

—Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, ch. 12