Category: Quotable

My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results. (pp. 511-512)

—C.G. Jung, “On Synchonicity,” trans. R.F.C. Hull, collected in The Portable Jung

One evening, after a week or two of rehearsals [of Our Mrs. McChesney], I was leaving the theater rather late, when most of the company had gone. George Hobart and I had had some changes to discuss. [Augustus] Thomas was still there. Near the door I called out across the stage, “Good night, Mr. Thomas.”

He glanced up. “Ah—good night, Miss—uh—uh—mmmm——”

“Ferber,” I prompted him, icily. He had seen me every day for weeks.

“Yes, yes, of course, Ferber. Ferber. I never can remember these Jewish names.”

“That must have been difficult for you when Mr. Frohman was producing your plays,” I retorted, by some lucky stroke; and slammed the door. Nothing slams more satisfactorily than a good heavy metal stage door.

—Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, p. 218

HAMLET. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

Act III, sc. ii

Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.

Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.

With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk. There is one large hotel to compete with the dozen in Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can make it. The only authentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is that in both cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do not look alike for so many miles.

—Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, chap. 19

Ulrich stubbornly expanded on this point: “What one needs in life is merely the conviction that one’s business is doing better than one’s neighbor’s. Your pictures, my mathematics, somebody else’s wife and children—everything that can assure a person that he is in no way unusual but that in this way of being in no way unusual he will not so easily find his equal!”

—Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, chap. 54

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy—and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.

Anne Enright, The Gathering, p. 28

Une étrange euphorie m’a alors envahi. Non seulement j’étais exilé, paralysé, muet, à moitié sourd, privé de tous les plaisirs et réduit à une existence de méduse, mais en plus j’étais affreux à voir. J’ai été pris du fou rire nerveux que finit par provoquer une accumulation de catastrophes lorsque, après un dernier coup de sort, on décide de le traiter comme une plaisanterie. Mes râles de bonne humeur ont d’abord interloqué Eugénie avant qu’elle ne cède à la contagion de mon hilarité. Nous avons ri jusqu’aux larmes. La fanfare municipale s’est alors mise à jouer une valse et j’étais si gai que je me serais volontiers levé pour inviter Eugénie à danser si cela avait été de circonstance. Nous aurions virevolté sur les kilomètres de carrelage. Depuis ces événements, quand j’emprunte la grande galerie, je trouve à l’impératrice un petit air narquois.

—Jean-Dominique Bauby, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, p. 31

My muddy translation, with help from my dictionary and Google Translate:

[Bauby has discovered his reflection in the glass of a vitrine displaying an effigy of Empress Eugénie, 19th-century patron of the hospital where Bauby is a patient.]

I was overcome by a strange euphoria. Not only was I an exile, paralyzed, half-deaf, dumb, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but what’s more I looked a fright. I was taken by a fit of the nervous giggles that can only end in disaster when, after a final stroke of fate, you take it all for a joke. At first, Eugénie was taken aback by my groans of delight before giving into the contagion of my hilarity. We laughed nearly to the point of tears. So then the local brass band struck up a waltz, and I felt so gay that I gladly stood up to invite Eugénie to dance, whether that made any difference [?]. We twirled down the miles of tiled floor. Since this affair, whenever I take a turn in the great hall, I find that the Empress has a mocking look.

The Scots-Irish seemed little moved by the magnificence of the Great Forest. The Germans were just as brutal to the land, only neater and more law-abiding about it. The English had already swept away coastal pineries to build tobacco plantations run by slaves. They all took from the forest without thinking of anything but their own desires, certainly not thinking that there might be anything sacred there. In this the new Americans were solidly in the mainstream of Western thought. What is distinctive about Appalachia is not how it differed from the rest of the country, but how it distilled the American experience to moonshine clarity. And how long the hangover is lasting.

—Chris Bolgiano, The Appalachian Forest: A Search for Roots and Renewal

If a child’s diaper is changed six times a day until he is 30 months old, he will have had his diaper changed more than 5,400 times. Anything a child experiences 5,400 times is an important part of his life for him and for those who create the experience.

—Diane Trister Dodge et al., The Creative Curriculum for Infants, Toddlers, and Twos

BRUCE: In my life I’m not going to be afraid to blind the horses, Prudence.

PRUDENCE: You ought to become a veterinarian.

BRUCE (very offended): You’ve missed the metaphor.

PRUDENCE: I haven’t missed the metaphor. I made a joke.

BRUCE: You just totally missed the metaphor. I could never love someone who missed the metaphor.

—Christopher Durang, Beyond Therapy, I:i

MOTHER MIRIAM RUTH. You’ll never find the answer to everything, Doctor. One and one is two, yes, but that leads to four and then to eight and soon to infinity. The wonder of science is not in the answers it provides but in the questions it uncovers. For every miracle it finally explains, ten thousand more miracles come into being.

—John Pielmeier, Agnes of God

…Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, chap. 12

…[William Faulkner] didn’t seem remote to everybody in being our great writer. I know a story about him, though he never knew anybody knew of it, I’d bet. Mississippi is full of writers, and I heard this from the person it was told to. A lady had decided she’d write a novel and got along fine till she came to the love scene. “So,” she told my friend, “I thought, there’s William Faulkner, sitting right up there in Oxford. Why not send it to William Faulkner and ask him?” So she sent it to him, and time went by, and she didn’t ever hear from him, and so she called him up. Because there he was. She said, “Mr. Faulkner, did you ever get that love scene I sent you?” He said yes, he had got it. And she said, “Well, what do you think of it?” And he said, “Well, honey, it’s not the way I’d do it—but you go right ahead.” Now, wasn’t that gentle of him?

—Eudora Welty, The Paris Review interview, Fall 1972