Eric > Eric's Quotes

“I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement in their fellow man, and have most hope in his goodness, who get the reputation of being his most carping critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of the possibilities of humankind in general, that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment. The satirist is usually a pretty unpopular fellow. The only time he attains even fleeting popularity is when his works can be used by some political faction as a stick to beat out the brains of their opponents. Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing. Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking hurts.

(John Dos Passos, 1957, from the speech he delivered upon accepting the Gold Medal for Eminence in Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters)”
― John Dos Passos

“Porky poked me on the shoulder and asked, “It’s a lot like life, isn’t it? A bus ride, that is.”
“Mmmmm?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just think about it. You’re always on your way from one goddamned place to another, and you have to pay for the trip, and nobody cares whether you get there or not, and you feel miserable the whole time, and when you get there nobody’s there to meet you, and like as not you step off the bus into some dog shit.”
― Eric Kraft, Life on the Bolotomy

“Her work failed her. She had reached a desperate, claustrophobic stage of being imprisoned halfway in a novel: there was too much behind her for her to retreat and not a glimmer of light ahead. She sat for hours without writing, staring at the last few wrods on the page, seeing no significance in them. Her characters fell into frozen poses, speech died on their lips: they had sat at a banquet for weeks and she had not the power to bring them to their feet again.”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“He’d worked for his bread, been hounded, hounded and oppressed by people and by necessity, just like everyone else. He’d worked nights; in Amsterdam he came home from the office at one or two in the morning, then sat up, brooded, scribbled, written whole novels and burned them.
What could he do? What did they accomplish with all that? . . . The world was still turning, turning exactly the way it always had, and it would keep on turning without him. He let it get to him. Now he was more sensible. He washed his hands of it. There were enough salesmen and writers and talkers and people who let it get to them — more than enough.
And they were always afraid of something and sad about something. Always scared to be late somewhere or get a scolding from someone, or they couldn’t make ends meet, or the toilet was stopped up, or they had an ulcer or their Sunday suit was starting to wear thin, or the rent was due; they couldn’t do this because of that and couldn’t possibly do that because of this. When he was young he was never that stupid.”
― Nescio

“The cool wind blew around us. The ocean made a complaining sound, the ocean that complains and doesn’t know why. The ocean washed woefully up onto the shore. My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits.
A new age would dawn, we could still do great things. I did my best to believe it, my very, very best.”
― Nescio

“There is no man,” [the painter Elstir] began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. . . . We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”
Marcel Proust
Within a Budding Grove (translated by C. Scott Moncrieff)”
― Marcel Proust

“I remember [Meyer] Schapiro telling us that before Cézanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cézanne’s landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping.
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage”
― Anatole Broyard

“A boatman on the bay, when the day was done and the desire to be at home and at rest became so tangible that he could feel the cold glass in his hand, would see the Babbington water tower above the roofs of the town, burnished by the late sunlight, more magnificent in its way than any cathedral—earthy, not ethereal, speaking of the simple comforts of this life, of home, a shower, a comfy chair, a full glass, a full stomach.”
― Eric Kraft, Life on the Bolotomy