Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my h...andwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude... toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech--it is a gift from heart to heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when one reflects on the books one never has written, and never may, though their schedules lie in the beautiful chirography w...hich marks the inception of an unexpressed thought upon the pages of one's notebook, one is aware, of any given idea, that the chances are against its ever being offered to one's dearest readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodie...s that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cassius is aweary of the world: Hated by one he loves; braved by his brother;... Checked like a bondman; all his faults observed, Set in a notebook, learned and conned by rote To cast into my teeth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books that have become classics--books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal--always remind me of retired c...olonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for th...e above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.... What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »