The Night Ocean Quotes

“The paradox of anthropology: to see something, you had to be outside of it, but when you were outside of it, you couldn't see it for what it was.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

“Always, always, he was holding something. He held his students' attention when they drooped, sleepy with cheap beer, sunlight, tennis. He held a dictionary in his lap. He held the Culhua Mexica in his head, the way a politician holds his constituents: he knew the provincial governors, the secretaries, the tax collectors, the high priests, and he tried to keep track of what they all wanted, so that he could read between the lines of their letters, which were full of strange formalities and equally strange abruptnesses.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

“Scratch a professor and you find a paranoiac, Barlow thought. But scratch a dean and you find a con artist.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

“The worst mistake you can make, Kroeber taught, is to see another person through the lens of your prejudices. The second worst mistake is to think you aren't looking through the lens of your prejudices.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

“The American id could not be educated, Spinks thought. It needed horror in order to stay awake and to justify its most pleasureful pursuit, the destruction of helpless people who had never done anything wrong.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

“Clearly, you don't know much about horror, he said. Horror is premised on the experience of what we do not and cannot understand, whereas what you're talking about is mere low-class smut, which every schoolboy has encountered before he's in long pants.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

“As a Freudian, I'm not supposed to use words like evil; my business is with instinct, memory, and desire. Nevertheless, I've been wondering, lately, whether evil might exist. If it does, I've been thinking, it might be like what Freud called the navel of the dream, the place where all the lines of meaning the analyst has so carefully traced through the patient's life vanish into the unknown. But where the navel of the dream is essentially harmless phenomenon, a point where the dream's meaning is sufficiently understood, and further interpretation would be pointless, evil is a mystery with power. It reaches up into the world and makes everything mysterious.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

“The worst mistake you can make, Kroeber taught, is to see another person through the lens of your prejudices. And the second-worst mistake is to think you aren't looking though the lens of your prejudices.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean