Darcy > Darcy's Quotes

“Was Anaxagoras an atheist? There is nothing anachronistic about this question. In the late 430s, he was put on trial for “impiety,” on the grounds that he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies (which he undoubtedly did). This may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted for heretical religious beliefs.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War is the culmination of the fifth-century tendency toward the exclusion of divine explanation. Not only does he refuse to admit non-naturalistic causality, but he cynically skewers any attempts on the part of the actors in his story to invoke the gods. Whatever his own personal beliefs were, the History can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“It was not just Critias, the author of the Sisyphus fragment, who reacted to the atheist revolution. Already, in the 420s, in the glow of the sophistic movement, tragedies and comedies began to explore the question of whether gods exist. The ideas canvassed by Protagoras, Democritus, and Prodicus reached a broad audience thanks to the theater.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Winding Stair And Other Poems

“You tell a teacher someone is calling you names. Blackie. Monkey girl. Golliwog. The teacher stares at you, exasperated, as if to say: Do you really expect me to do something about it? The next time you have a grievance, you look for a different teacher.”
― Maxine Beneba Clarke, The Hate Race

“We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken—Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch—sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war. The greyhound is”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin in the spring of 1984. Like Orwell when he began Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was in her early forties and she knew exactly what she wanted to say. The novel originated with a file of newspaper cuttings she had begun collecting while living in England, covering such topics as the religious right, prisons in Iran, falling birth rates, Nazi sexual politics, polygamy and credit cards. She let these diverse observations ferment, like compost, until a story grew out of them. Her travels in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where she experienced “the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information,” nourished the novel, too, as did her adolescent obsession with dystopias and World War Two.”
― Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984

“In Antwerp they slide the printed sheets of the gospels between the folds of bales of cloth, where they hide, white against white. Warm, nestled, God whispers within each bundle; His word sails the sea, is unloaded in eastern ports, travels to London in a cart.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“In Italy you learned cunning, but in Antwerp, flexibility. And besides, the shopping! Just step out of your door and you can get a diamond or a broom, you can get knives, candlesticks and keys, ironwork to suit the expert eye. They make soap and glass, they cure fish and they deal in alum and promissory notes. You can buy pepper and ginger, aniseed and cumin, saffron and rice, almonds and figs; you can buy vats and pots, combs and mirrors, cotton and silk, aloes and myrrh.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“In Antwerp, the more tongues you could master, the more you could succeed. If he lacked a phrase in one language, he had it in another, and his earnest vehemence made up for any gaps. He sought out, as he had in Italy, the company of sober elders, whose table talk was refined and who would give away their wisdom to a young foreigner who admired them, one who asks questions, questions, and looks impressed by the replies. Such dignitaries always need a repository for their secrets, just as they need a man who will take a confidential dispatch and be back with an answer before you notice he’s gone. The drawback is that one must consent to their indoor lives: no calcio, just polite archery on a Sunday. The courtyards where one trades in wool and money may be open to the sky, yet they cannot help but smell of tallow, ink and dinners, seeped into the wool of dark winter garments: he would walk, and under the shadow of the Steen with its warehouses take a breath of river air, and imagine the great world beyond. There were some hundred of his countrymen – Englishmen, that is – dwelling in or around their English House; they lived side by side with the Castilian nation, the Portuguese and the Germans, but they were cherished by the city because they paid so well for their privileges.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“There are more English books printed in Antwerp than in London, but those who print without a licence are branded, sometimes an eye is gouged out or a hand cut off. And informers are everywhere. Even, no doubt, amongst our own merchants.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“Modernism sent fissures through a whole bundle of myths: that a narrative must have a beginning, a middle and an end, and romance be between a hero and heroine; that art should be representative and music follow familiar notations. The modernist movement questioned orthodoxies: that God made the world in seven days, that Christ was the Son of God, parented by a virgin and a ghost, that there were tangible domains of heaven and hell, that kings were in their palaces by divine right, that man was king of all species, and that war was an acceptable way of resolving conflict between nations.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“Harold Monro, with his Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street in Bloomsbury, was a mentor and inspiration. In 1913 he had turned an eighteenth-century house into a shop, publishing house and meeting place for poets and readers. At his own expense he published poetry and edited The Poetry Review. The shop was on the ground floor. The poet Amy Lowell called it a room rather than a shop. There was a coal fire, comfortable chairs, a cat and a couple of dogs. Offices were on the first floor, poetry readings were held on the second, and at the top were two attic rooms for poets and artists who needed cheap lodgings.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“No New York newspaper came to their defence or spoke out for Joyce.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“the glory days of Shakespeare and Company were done. Its demise marked the end of the exuberance and freedom of modernist innovation. Old-style masculine domination steamrollered in with murder, repression, punishment and with winning defined by who best killed and destroyed. Sylvia talked of the ‘insanity’ of war. Samuel Beckett said she had a permanent worried look. ‘Everyone in Paris wants to flee to America away from wars and dictators,’ Sylvia wrote to her father. Bryher assured her that whatever happened to Shakespeare and Company, she would look after her. ‘I tried always to do what I could for the real artists and especially for the woman artist,’ she said. These women artists were lesbian.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“Sylvia and Adrienne came under Nazi scrutiny. Sylvia was warned of the imminent confiscation of her books. Adrienne was suspect for having written a condemnation of Nazism and anti-Semitism. She helped Gisèle Freund get to Buenos Aires as the guest of Victoria Ocampo, the feminist Argentine writer who founded the literary journal Sur, and in May 1940 she hid Walter Benjamin and Arthur Koestler in her apartment. Koestler, who had been imprisoned in Spain for airing anti-fascist views, was writing Darkness at Noon.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“in these stories, written with no particular reader in mind, she found the key to freeing the small boy trapped in the wrong body, a salve to the gender quandary that so dismayed her when every expectation was for her to be a girl with curls.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“When Camus’s mother asked him what he wanted as a wedding gift, he replied, “A dozen pairs of white socks.”
― Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life

“There is vertigo in losing oneself and denying everything, in breaking forever what once defined us, and which now offers only solitude and the void, all in order to find the only platform from which destinies may always begin again. The temptation is everlasting, but should one accept or reject it? Should one bring the obsession with a work to the emptiness of a humdrum life, or on the contrary should one make one’s life worthy of it by obeying flashes of lightning? Beauty is my direst concern, along with freedom.”
― Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life

“L’Etranger was printed in France on May 19, 1942, in an edition of 4,400 copies. This was as large as initial printings of works by established authors, like Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami and Gide’s Théâtre. Other new Gallimard books by the playwright Jacques Audiberti, the critic Maurice Blanchot, and the essayist Marcel Jouhandeau, had much lower printings. But a new mystery by Georges Simenon had a printing of 11,000 copies, and Saint-Exupéry’s aviation memoirs, Pilote de guerre, 22,000. Camus could not inscribe copies to journalists in the French publishing tradition, nor could he see copies in bookstores or read the first reviews in newspapers. Gaston had decided to put L’Etranger on sale without waiting for the essay, whose proofs Paulhan was correcting, minus the controversial pages on Kafka.”
― Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life

“LE MYTHE DE SISYPHE is dense, epigrammatic, and of a deceptive clarity. It looks like a short essay, without technical jargon, cryptic sometimes to a fault. In it, Camus spoke of the world, history, and of his life.”
― Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life

“The individual can do nothing and yet he can do everything.… I am on the side of struggle.”
― Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life

“Rousseaux was considered the pope of book critics, and reading L’Etranger made him reflect: “It seems that the crisis of the novel gets a little worse every day. Young novelists’ debuts do not just mostly reveal mediocre talents.”
― Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life

“Camus and Sartre enjoyed laughing together”
― Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life

“Dean glances at the customer with the blue glasses. He’s switched Record Weekly for a book, Down and Out in Paris and London. Dean wonders if he’s a beatnik. A few guys at art college posed as beats. They smoked Gauloises, talked about existentialism, and walked around with French newspapers.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“To have your photo taken is to be told, “You exist.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“You must have been studying her life.’ ‘We have a book in the convent library.’ ‘Is your library extensive?’ ‘Well, there’s some lives of the saints. Oh, and a Turf Guide, that’s Sister Anthony’s.”
― Hilary Mantel, Fludd

“The way we start a dialogue group is usually by talking about dialogue – talking it over, discussing why we’re doing it, what it means, and so forth. I don’t think it is wise to start a group before people have gone into all that, at least somewhat. You can, but then you’ll have to trust that the group will continue, and that these questions will come out later. So if you are thinking of meeting in a group, one thing which I suggest is to have a discussion or a seminar about dialogue for a while, and those who are interested can then go on to have the dialogue. And you mustn’t worry too much whether you are or are not having dialogue – that’s one of the blocks. It may be mixed.”
― David Bohm, On Dialogue (Routledge Classics)

“Really, the new hand felt normal, no different from her old hand. It was impossible to say why she felt so oddly about it, thought Anna. It was her hand, after all. Except somehow, looking at it, in a way she had no words to describe, it no longer was.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams