Matthew Cheney > Matthew's Quotes

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  • #1
    Alfred North Whitehead
    “It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.”
    ― Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
    tags: danger, future, science
    24 likes

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  • #2
    Randall Jarrell
    “Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.”
    ― Randall Jarrell, No Other Book: Selected Essays – Literary Criticism and Prose by Randall Jarrell, A Leading American Poet-Critic
    tags: art, novels, perfection
    5 likes

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  • #3
    “He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world’s terms: there is no mystery here. This was not insanity, but common sense.”
    ― Raymond Weaver, The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville: Benito Cereno/Bartleby the Scrivener/The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles/Billy Budd, Foretopman
    tags: defeat, failure, genius
    4 likes

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  • #4
    Ronald Sukenick
    “Use your imagination," I tell my students these days, "or someone else is going to use it for you.”
    ― Ronald Sukenick, Down and in: Life in the Underground
    tags: imagination
    6 likes

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  • #5
    Joshua Slocum
    “I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
    ― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World
    tags: alone, books, friends, solitude
    3498 likes

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  • #6
    George Orwell
    “In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.”
    ― George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950
    tags: literature, merit, opinion, shakespeare, taste
    5 likes

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  • #7
    Paul Bowles
    “Although I knew enough Freud to believe that the sex urge was an important mainspring of life, it still seemed to me that any conscious manifestation of sex was necessarily ludicrous. Defecation and copulation were two activities which made a human being totally ridiculous. At least the former could be conducted in private, but the latter by definition demanded a partner. I discovered, though, that whenever I ventured this opinion, people took it as a joke.”
    ― Paul Bowles, Without Stopping
    tags: bodies, sex
    5 likes

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  • #8
    Thomas Bernhard
    “Nothing but disaster follows from applause.”
    ― Thomas Bernhard
    tags: acclaim, success
    8 likes

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  • #9
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.”
    ― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
    tags: defining, definitions, history, process
    13 likes

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  • #10
    Will Oldham
    “It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.”
    ― Will Oldham
    tags: complicity, excess, scarcity
    2 likes

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  • #11
    W.G. Sebald
    “We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.”
    ― W.G. Sebald
    tags: history
    40 likes

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  • #12
    Franz Kafka
    “I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
    ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
    tags: communication, fear
    1555 likes

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  • #13
    Ernst Pawel
    “Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.”
    ― Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka
    tags: death, kafka, life, writers, writing
    2 likes

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  • #14
    Gilbert Sorrentino
    “All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.”
    ― Gilbert Sorrentino
    41 likes

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  • #15
    Gilbert Sorrentino
    “I like to synthesize; I hate analysis. I don’t like to take a subject and break it down into parts; I like to take disparate parts and put them all together and see what happens. I believe the old saw that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Of course, it may also be less. But it’s the parts that interest me; it’s not the whole.”
    ― Gilbert Sorrentino
    tags: fragments, structure, writing
    6 likes

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  • #16
    Gilles Deleuze
    “Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
    ― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
    tags: art, individuality, inspirational, life, new, otherness
    325 likes

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  • #17
    James Baldwin
    “No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
    ― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
    tags: 181, dangerous, purity
    63 likes

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  • #18
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
    ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
    tags: art, good-life, music, poetry, self-improvement
    4389 likes

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  • #19
    Samuel Beckett
    “We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
    ― Samuel Beckett
    2424 likes



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