Courtesy of emeritus zoologist and Ice Age maven Valerius Geist: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” “The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse.” “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” (All …
Tag: Quotes
Quotes on Boooks and Writing
From Larry McMurtry: “The reader might well ask why this account of the expanding and contracting of my various libraries matters at all. “I could give several answers to the question but the simplest one is that you write what you’ve read, to a large degree– and, just as importantly, you write what you will …
Another Quote
From Sean Sexton’s Blood Writing, attributed to “Anon.”, in a small seafood restaurant in the Yucatan: Ama la vida a la frontala, porque buena y mala, sola tenemos una. (Love life and face it, because good or bad, we have only one)
Quote
…a step ahead of the banker, a moment behind convention, putting off heaven and hell as long as possible. –from Blood Writing, by Sean Sexton UPDATE: The poet sends his picture, in his Querencia, and a painting. I’d love to see that place. Meanwhile, get his book!
Curmudgeonly Quotes and Related Matters
A :Dave Petzal, Field & Stream’s resident curmudgeon (and the main if not only reason to read that mag any more) was asked why he had such a bad attitude. He responded: “Because I have had the opportunity to observe human beings for seven decades, and if you do it for that long and don’t …
Dog Quote
“Dogs are like people. Not too literally, of course, but in the sense that the dog population contains a virtually infinite range of individuals – distinctive in physical structure, temperament and past experience. As a group, they are more loyal, more forgiving, more generous, yet less neurotic than people. Our relationship with each of them …
True Writing Quote
From Walter Hingley: “Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than …
One More Quote
From Jules Older, The Writer’s Lifeguard: “Job applications used to routinely ask you for your hobbies. I always proudly answered, ‘None.’ I’m a man with goals and dreams, passions and projects, not hobbies. Real writers don’t do hobbies.”
Found Quote
From an article called “The Hound and the Fury” in Esquire for April, 1985, the travel issue; by Alan Furst, now our finest spy novelist, specializing in WW II and before: “Once you own a sight hound– Afghan, Borzoi, Saluki, greyhound, and whippet and some of the others– you are addicted for life.”
Russian Quote
From the NYT, courtesy of Reid: “… gun control in Russia is less strict than in some other former Soviet countries. Estonia, for example, proscribes carrying a weapon while drunk. “If they did that here, well, nobody would hunt,” said Igor V. Anisimov, the Izhmash director of foreign sales.”