Keely > Keely's Quotes

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The beauty of free speech which is free is that it is self-annihilating, whether in tiny amounts or in great amounts; and the menace of speech which is not free is that it is self-perpetuating, like a cellar full of rats.”
― E.B. White , On Democracy

“Men are not merely annihilating themselves at a great rate these days, but they are telling one another enormous lies, grandiose fibs...they are more destructive than dive bombers and mine fields, for they challenge not merely one's immediate position but one's main defenses.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“...I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.”
― E.B. White

“But a man's free condition is of two parts: the instinctive freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“...it is not the written word, but the spoken word, which in heated moments moves great masses of people to noble or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something which every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual standards, not by what the man standing next to him thinks.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“[Writers] are feared by every tyrant--who shows his fear by burning the books and destroying the individuals.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off--even before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied to me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and I would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it anymore and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“Who is there big enough to love the whole planet? We must find such a people for the next society.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than his planet; the by-laws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members. A club, moreover, or a nation, offers the right to be exclusive. There are not many of us who are physically constituted to resist this strange delight, this nourishing privilege. It is at the bottom of all fraternities, societies, orders. It is at the bottom of most trouble. The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody's. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, and the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“I think a good many people, here and everywhere, have a feeling in their bones that some sort of large-scale reawakening is in the cards for humanity.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“There is a vague feeling that after great evil comes great good; after trouble comes absence of trouble; after war, peace. It is a mystical, rather than logical, presentiment. History does not offer any very impressive corroboration; flip over its pages and you are apt to find the disagreeable reminder that after trouble comes more trouble. Yet it is a feeling everyone must hold to.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“It was a familiar pantomime--the free press, deplored yet admired. Under their vests the senators were secretly glad that they were unable to dislodge a couple of American photographers. It was what the hearing was about, really--the photographers, squatting imperturbably in front of the men who were plotting to win a war that would preserve for photographers the right to squat imperturbably.”
― E.B. White

“Treason is too narrowly defined to suit us. Our courts call it treason when a restaurant-keeper helps a German flier to escape, but nobody calls it treason when a congressman helps a touchy issue to escape "until after the elections are over." We hang a man for the first kind of treason; we reelect a man for the second.”
― E.B. White

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“Slowly but surely, I grew more and more disoriented, increasingly more detached from the world, something sad and awful straining around the edges of my mouth, surfacing in my eyes.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Nevertheless, not even ten thousand photographs can secure a world...”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“The children, however, just accepted it. They raced through the closet. They played in it. They inhabited it. They denied paradox by swallowing it whole. Paradox, after all, is two irreconcilable truths. But children do not know the laws of the world well enough yet to fear the ramifications of the irreconcilable.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“The blind must rely on the feeble light of fingertips and the painful shape of a cracked shin.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow & blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with those reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent & sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din. A thousand and one possible claws.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Lude would never feel how 'empty hallways long past midnight' could slice inside of you, though I'm not so sure he wasn't sliced up just the same. Not seeing the rip doesn't mean you automatically get to keep clear of the Hey-I'm-Bleeding part.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate. And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only science.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“And so it was that before another synapse could fire within my bad-off labyrinthine brain, he was already lying on the floor.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“She removes herself from her family's company by saying very little, while at the same time maintaining a semblance of participation with a smile.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men