The City of Trembling Leaves Quotes

“Places, like people, have their beginnings and have also their endings.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves

“Nothing imaginative ever happens to five people at once, because each is up to only one-fifth of his personal intelligence and perception. A crowd is never equal to the intelligence of any one of its members.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves

“It is possible to insult Americans?”
“They are automatically insulted and enraged,” said the young composer. “They form splenetic organizations by the hundreds, and write letters to periodicals and congressmen. They gather in mobs and pay no attention. They hang people without trial and shoot citizens down with machine guns out of passing cars. They will despise you because you do not eat the same things they eat for breakfast. They even apply indifference.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves

“Just being is the main thing. Anything else is extra.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves

“Yet the great “Why?” always at the center of the little “whats” and “hows” that makes religions into mythologies is often stronger in dead temples than in living.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves