Harry > Harry's Quotes

“The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized
of new kinds—
since their movements
are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost
a world unsuspected
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness

With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining—
grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire

Love without shadows stirs now
beginning to awaken
as night
advances

The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
which is a reversal
of despair
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love
what we have lost in the anticipation—
a descent follows
endless and indestructible”
― William Carlos Williams

“Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr.
Paterson has gone away
to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees
his thoughts sitting and standing. His
thoughts alight and scatter–

Who are these people (how complex
the mathematic) among whom I see myself
in the regularly ordered plateglass of
his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“I asked him, What do you do?

He smiled patiently, The typical American question.
In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or,
What are you doing now?

What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No
sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire
occupation.”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“The province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets darkness comes down
and the poem is dark .

and lamps are lit, cats prowl and men
read, read–or mumble and stare
at that which their small lights distinguish
or obscure or their hands search out

in the dark. The poem moves them or
it does not move them. Faitoute, his ears
ringing . no sound . no great city,
as he seems to read–”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscraper. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will just glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.”
― John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

“But what can you do with success when you get it? You cant eat it or drink it. Of course I understand that people who havent enough money to feed their faces and all that should scurry round and get it. But success . . .” “The trouble with me is I cant decide what I want most, so my motion is circular, helpless and confoundedly discouraging.” “Oh but God decided that for you. You know all the time, but you wont admit it to yourself.” “I imagine what I want most is to get out of this town, preferably first setting off a bomb under the Times Building.”
― John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer: A Novel

“Three hundred years ago mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball's rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height, Δx and Δy, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy has been handed down intact–it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy, flightless themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf [...] a hostility, a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond. A conviction that, for synthetics to have a future at all, the bond must be improved on–some students even read "transcended." That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond–where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities . . . how he came to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stubbornness!”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Maybe it is nothingness that is real and our entire dream is nonexistent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must also be nothing. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Almost immediately, reality gave ground on more than one point. The truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order–dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism–was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws–I translate: inhuman laws–which we will never completely perceive. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
Contact with Tlön and the ways of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I’d seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.  ”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. [...] Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously,” I should have said, “a minor tremor in my hand; I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“I asked him to look at me and then promised him in two languages the only thing I could: he had nothing to fear from Joseph Kony.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism—ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.—in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality. It allowed you to redescribe caring for your own genetic material—feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice—as altruism: it’s not just good for Lucas, it’s good for the planet. But from those who out of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children’s digestive tracts to know deep-fried, mechanically processed chicken, those who happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“Not the shattered or slashed works to which Alena thrilled, but those objects in the archive that both were and weren't different moved me: they had been redeemed, both in the sense that the fetish had been converted back into cash, the claim paid out, but also in the messianic sense of being saved from something, saved for something. An art commodity that had been exorcised (and survived the exorcism) of the fetishism of the market was to me a utopian readymade–an object for or from a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“Whenever I walked across the Manhattan Bridge, I remembered myself as having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. This is because you can see the latter from the former, and the latter is more beautiful. [...] But by the time I arrived in Brooklyn to meet Alex, I was starting to misremember crossing in the third person, as if I had somehow watched myself walking beneath the Brooklyn Bridge's Aeolian cables.”
― Ben Lerner

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”
― Coetzee, Disgrace (99) by Coetzee, J M [Paperback (2000)]

“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“But then, who of us hasn't had a promised land, caught up with happiness, the constant nymph, and run with her swiftly through the green birch forest of Arden only to trip and fall and watch her disappear into the trees without a backward glance? So light a candle, love the light, and face the darkness when the candle fails.”
― Patrick Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa