Harrison Brace > Harrison's Quotes

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.' At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last—and no one can concentrate on anything—for longer than about two seconds.”
― Geoff Dyer, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

“This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen.”
― Kealan Patrick Burke

“It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.”
― Christopher Bram, The Notorious Dr. August: A Riveting Historical Novel of Ghosts, Love, and a Clairvoyant Pianist

“But I awoke at three, feeling terribly sad, and feeling rebelliously that I didn't want to study sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair. I wanted to study triumphs, the rediscoveries of love, all that I know in the world to be decent, radiant, and clear. Then the word "love", the impulse to love, welled up in me somewhere above my middle. Love seemed to flow from me in all directions, abundant as water--love for Cora, love for Flora, love for all my friends and neighbors, love for Penumbra. This tremendous flow of vitality could not be contained within its spelling, and I seemed to seize a laundry marker and write "luve" on the wall. I wrote "luve" on the staircase, "luve" on the pantry, "luve" on the oven, the washing machine, and the coffeepot, and when Cora came down in the morning (I would be nowhere around) everywhere she looked she would read "luve", "luve", "luve." Then I saw a green meadow and a sparkling stream. On the ridge there were thatched-roof cottages and a square church tower, so I knew it must be England. I climbed up from the meadow to the streets of the village, looking for the cottage where Cora and Flora would be waiting for me. There seemed to have been some mistake. No one knew their names. I asked at the post office, but the answer here was the same. Then it occurred to me that they would be at the manor house. How stupid I had been! I left the village and walked up a sloping lawn to a Georgian house, where a butler let me in. The squire was entertaining. There were twenty-five or thirty people in the hall, drinking sherry. I took a glass from a tray and looked through the gathering for Flora and my wife, but they were not there. Then I thanked my host and walked down the broad lawn, back to the meadow and the sparkling brook, where I lay on the grass and fell into a sweet sleep.”
― John Cheever

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“ABSQUATULATE To flee, abscond, or boogie. This facetious frontier slang combines the notion of speculating with squatting or camping. An example of America’s “barbaric brilliancy”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“You don't need to get the reference to get the joke; but the joke eventually got me to Swinburne, who would gradually turn out to be the most accomplished poet that I couldn't stand.”
― Anonymous

“But other scenes pay off, including a heart-clutching moment when an infected Felix, riding the subway, spots a man who is sicker than he is: skeletal, coated in lesions, a vision flashing in and out as lights flicker. The movie is at its best when it’s capturing this horror-film quality of the period, the physical vulnerability that the poet Thom Gunn wrote about so beautifully in his poem “The Man with Night Sweats”: the fruitless wish that “hands were enough / to hold an avalanche off.”
― Anonymous

“and the Nazis. A real piece of work, old number XII, who wouldn’t intervene even so far as to tell his Polish cardinals to dampen the enthusiasm of the good Catholics running the camps and the”
― Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

“The first thing you see, directly in front of you, is a dim-lit tunnel receding deep under the island. The tunnel is paved with tiny glass beads of light, one for each of the two hundred thousand deportees. On the end wall of the tunnel is a bright light, almost a searchlight, which I’ve been told is intended to represent hope. But it”
― Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

“But of no nombre mencioun made he, Of bigamye, or of octogamye33. Why sholde men thanne speke of it vileinye34?”
― Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

“that all there is is love. Pity us not. Los Angeles 29 June 1987”
― Paul Monette, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog

“walking with on Robertson was an outing of the self-destructed, trying to make do with one day at a time.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“a body on the sand. My journal gets very spotty here, with only a single detailed entry”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“How far was that? On March 1 he told us the chest x-ray looked clear, except for a shadow that was probably the pulmonary artery, but he was playing safe and ordering a CAT scan to make sure it wasn’t a lymph node. Roger and I had lunch that day at the hospital cafeteria, in the prison-yard court on plastic chairs under a lowering sky. Roger said how glad he”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“the tenth floor of the medical center from a dozen others. Amateurs still at the system, I expect we appeared like two meek refugees, with the overnight bag and a briefcase full of work. The tenth floor at UCLA is called the”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.”
― Paul Monette

“The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man

“We queers of Revelation hill...died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don't pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.”
― Paul Monette

“I must’ve gone out for dinner with Al and Bernice, and I must’ve been full of reassurance and interstitial data. All the blood work was normal so far, but I don’t recall if an actual T-cell test was taken, or if we knew the results before the verdict. The T cells are a subset of the white blood count. Infection with the”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“The Brothers Karamazov is a joyful book.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Tell me, love, what I can't explain:
Should I spend this short, horrid time
with thoughts only, and alone
know no love and give none?
Must one think? Won't he be missed?”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann

“—I think he died for me, she answered.”
― James Joyce, The Dead (A Novella)

“His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, The Dead

“Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side; and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure.”
― James Joyce, The Dead