Scrapbook

A collection of quotes, phrases, lyrics…

“Is it common sense or radicalism when the many express their disapprobation of the tyranny and domineering of the few?”

-John Clare

“You exist only in what you do.”

-Frederico Fellini

“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”

-William Shakespeare, King Lear

“For the poet there are no ideas but in things”

-William Carlos Williams

“I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare, and obscure, the impractical and local and small.”

-Rebecca Solnit

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

-Thomas Paine

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“You can’t hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella.”

-Philip Rahv

“Much madness is divinest sense
to a discerning eye…”

-Emily Dickinson

“We hate your hate.”

-Broken Social Scene

“Sunday Morning” (The whole poem!)

-Poem by Wallace Stevens

“If i could do anything in your world i’d be doing nothing.”

-Cap’n Jazz, “Rocky Rococo”

“When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only one way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough.”

-Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

“How do you say a thing at all, at the end of the day? How do you say what’s in your mind? And as soon as you say what you actually have in mind, it’s wrong, isn’t it?”

-Ciaran Carson

“All human errors stem from impatience.”

–Franz Kafka

“[…] several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…”

–John Keats

“A human being who is not mindful at every moment of the potential for extreme horror at the present time must be so bemused by the veil of ideology that he might just as well stop thinking at all.”

-Theodor W. Adorno

“The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.”

– Heraclitus

“Look here, Mr. Goodwood,” she said; “just you wait!”

On which he looked up at her – but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience.”

-Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

“Je ne sais pas où je suis, je ne le saurai jamais, dans le silence on ne peut savoir, on doit juste avancer.”

-Samuel Beckett, L’Innomable

“Genius is not a gift, but the way out a person invents in desperate circumstances.”

-Jean-Paul Sartre

“There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Sensible Thing”

“We all seem so frail really, under the full frail morning spider webs we spread in the sun…”

-Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 23, 1967

“Bereft of memory, a person becomes the prisoner of an illusory existence: falling out of time he is unable to seize his own link with the outside world. In other words he is doomed to madness.”

-Andrei Tarkovsky

“Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not.”

-Alan Sillitoe

“You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It’s all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we’re all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is…”

-Henry Miller

“We learn nothing from those who say ‘Do as I do’. Our only teachers are those who say ‘Do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce”

-Gilles Deleuze