Andrew > Andrew's Quotes

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“material is the source for everything seen or said or done on the stage.”
― Arthur Laurents, Mainly on Directing

“Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.”
― David Leavitt, Collected Stories

“When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.”
― David Leavitt

“All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
― DH Lawrence

“in more and more spheres of American life, well-intentioned people who genuinely believe that they are fighting for righteous causes are doing what they can to make racial identity the all-encompassing dividing line of American life.”
― Yascha Mounk, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure

“The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism. ”
― Reinhold Niebuhr

“Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: Study in Ethics and Politics

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr

“Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History

“Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer. Laughter must be heard in the outer courts of religion, and the echoes of it should resound in the sanctuary; but there is no laughter in the holy of holies. There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.

The intimate relation between humour and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. ... Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times: Sermons for Today and Tomorrow

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr

“Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr

“When economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
― Robertson Davies

“If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.-Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz (1939)”
― Noel Langley