Canyonfire Quotebook
These are some quotes I have collected
over the years. I hope you enjoy them!—Larry Lynch
The winding waterfront street was almost deserted as Mike strode vigorously toward the dock for the last boat to Naples. . . . Mike told himself that he was very happy about going back home. . . . But . . . he was very much aware of the show being put on in his honor by this pleasant isle of Capri. The quiet harbor was a study in shimmering blues and blacks, dotted by the highlights of a hundred electric light bulbs. For the first time in a long while, he found himself consciously breathing the good smells of a different way of life—the salt tang of drying fishnets and the dinner odor of pasta and olive oil.
—Saul Cooper, It Started in Naples
In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.
* * *
The most tedious travel book in my opinion is the one in which the author is being vague about having a wonderful time. All that jauntiness seems like boasting to me, and dishonest boasting too, since the writers must be hiding so much misery. We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.
* * *
"I have been traveling myself," he said. "I must stop traveling or I'll never write anything."
"I know the feeling. Monotony is the friend of the writer."* * *
[Bowles] seemed to me a man who masked all his feelings; he had a glittering eye, but a cold gaze. He seemed at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, egomaniacal, and hospitable to praise. He was like almost every other writer I had known in my life.
* * *
Places had voices that were not their own; they were backdrops to a greater drama, or else to something astonishingly ordinary, like the ragged laundry hung from the nave of a plundered Crusader church in Tartus . . .. Most of the time, traveling, I had no idea where I was going. I was not even quite sure why. I was no historian. I was not a geographer. I hated politics. What I liked most was having space and time; getting up in the morning and setting off for a destination which at any moment—if something better compelled my attention—I could abandon. I had no theme . . . . I had set out to be on the Mediterranean, without a fixed program. I was not writing a book—I was living my life, and had found an agreeable way to do it.
—Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules
I camped that first night in a washaway, near the ruins of a cottage. I awoke to the muttering of a single crow staring at me not ten feet away. The pre-dawn light, all pastel misty blue and translucent, filtered through the leaves and created a fairy-land. The character of such country changes wonderfully through the day, and each change has its effect on one's mood.
* * *
As I came over the crest I saw an infinitely extended bowl of pastel blue haze with writhing hills and crescents floating and shimmering in it and fire-coloured dunes lapping at their feet and off in the distance some magical, violet mountains . . . . Nothing as wildly beautiful as that had I ever seen, even in my dream landscapes.
—Robyn Davidson, Tracks
It's a good sign when you don't think you can do it. It means you are about to stretch yourself.
—yours truly, March '02
COMUs up the ying-yang!
—Jamie Hall, referring to the number of common murres on Great Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore during an El Niño year
I'm just a noodlebrain!
—Rita Sorkness, Nov '99
You cannot reap what you do not sow.
—song on "The American Embassy" (Fox Television), March '02
When our memories exceed our dreams, we become old.
—Bill Clinton, Dec '99
If at night you cry for the sun, you'll never see the stars.
—Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener
. . . a work of art is a conscious human effort that hast to do with communication. It is that or it is nothing.
—Orson Welles, Playboy interview, Mar '67
Emerson used to say that the essence of a college education was having a room of one's own, with a fire, in a strange city.
—Lewis Mumford, The Human Prospect
The Vatican Library. His eyes wandered over the long lines of silent readers. . . . It was strange how the barriers of time seemed to fall away when one lost oneself among the bookshelves and their occupants. A mighty discussion, which spanned hundreds of years, was going on within these myriads of pages. One had only to listen to the multifarious voices.
—Gören Stenius, The Bells of Rome
What am I to do? Blow away in a summer's kiss?
—Kristin Kanzelberger, summer '66
…there atop the rock beside which the grave was being hollowed out stood the shepherdess Marcela herself, more beautiful even then she was reputed to be…
"I do not come , 0 Ambrosio, for any of the reasons that you have mentioned," replied Marcela. "I come to defend myself and to demonstrate how unreasonable all those persons are who blame me for their sufferings and for Grisóstomo's death…
"I have been made beautiful, you say, so beautiful that you are compelled to love me whether you will or no; and in return for the love you show me, you would have it that I am obliged to love you in return. I know, with that natural understanding that God has given me, that everything beautiful is lovable; but I cannot see that it follows that the object that is loved for its beauty must love the one who loves it …"Beauty in a modest woman is like a distant fire or sharp-edged sword: the one does not burn, the other does not cut, those who do not come near it. Honor and virtue are the adornments of the soul, without which the body is not beautiful though it may appear to be. If modesty is one of the virtues that most adorn and unify body and soul, why should she who is loved for her beauty part with that virtue merely to satisfy the whim of one who solely for his own pleasure strives with all his force and energy to cause her to lose it? I was born a free being, and in order to live freely I chose the solitude of the fields; these mountain trees are my company, the clear-running waters in these brooks are my mirror, and to the trees and waters I communicate my thoughts and lend them of my beauty.
"In short, I am that distant fire, that sharp-edged sword, that does not burn or cut. Those who have been enamored by the sight of me I have disillusioned with my words; and if desire is sustained by hope, I gave none to Grisóstomo or any other, and of none of them can it be said that I killed them with my cruelty."—from the tale of the Shepherdess Marcela in Don Quixote
de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
(Samuel Putnam translation)
The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty . . . . When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye . . . . Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they—this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.
—Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz
Evelyn combed her black hair and touched her face and leaned over her, and the little girl's arms went around Evelyn's neck and she kissed her on the lips. . . .
She was so desperately in love that she could no longer see properly, something had happened to her eyes, and she blinked constantly as if to clear them of the blur.
* * *
When I saw you at my meeting I was ready to accept the mystical rule of all experience. You came because in such ways as the universe works, your life was destined to interact with my own.
* * *
Gradually Evelyn relaxed and her flesh shook and quivered under the emphatic skill of Goldman's hands. Goldman rubbed the oil into her skin until her body found its own natural rosy white being and began to stir with self-perception. . . . Evelyn's hair was now undone and lay on the pillow about her face. Her eyes were closed and her lips stretched in an involuntary smile as Goldman massaged her breasts, her stomach, her legs.
—E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime
At that moment she would have given a week's pay for one good hot, dry day, for the sight of one small fence lizard, the scent of sage on the wind.
The moment these thoughts blew in, Anna closed her mind to them. The lake didn't allow for dreamers, not when the waves were three meters, not when a dilapidated sea anchor hung off the stern. The desert, with its curtains of heat and scoured, star-deep skies, was for dreaming. This land of mist and dark water took all of one's mind up with the day-to-day chore of staying alive.
—Nevada Barr, A Superior Death
I listened to Zorba in silence. If only I could never open my mouth, I thought, until the abstract idea had reached its highest point–and had become a story! But only the great poets reach a point like that, or a people, after centuries of silent effort.
—Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
I woke late on my last morning, out of dreams where the Llanstephan sea carried bright sailing-boats as long as liners.
—Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
They passed little gardens, high up the crumbling wall, hung with clustering white and purple flower that sent down an odour of almonds. Moorish lattices showed shadowy in the gloom. The marble steps of a church descended into the canal…
—Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice"
Mi infancia son recuerdos de un patio en Sevilla, y un huerto claro donde madura el limonero; mi juventud, veinte años en tierra de Castilla . . .
* * *
My childhood, memories of a patio in Seville, and a luminous garden where the lemon tree ripens; my youth, twenty years in the land of Castille . . .
—Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla
(Countryside of Castile)
'Giles!' she said again more strongly, and what colour she had drained from her face and left her almost translucent, staring down at a face once imperious, wilful and handsome. She sank to her knees, stooping to study the dead face close, and then she uttered the only cry she ever made over her brother, and that very brief and private, and swooped breast to breast with him, gathering the body into her arms. The mass of her hair slipped out of its coils and spilled gold over them both.
—Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many
(Brother Cadfael chronicles)
A trip is a process . . . . There are often connections that link one place to another, or to yourself. . . . I'd often catch myself, as I blasted down the road, with a big smile on my face. It felt grand.
—Stuart Wittwer, on his celestial motorcycle trip, January 1998
"Hum! Hum!" said the King. "I have good reason to believe that somewhere on my planet there is an old rat. I hear him at night. You can judge this old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. Thus his life will depend on your justice. But you will pardon him on each occasion; for he must be treated thriftily. He is the only one we have.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
The traveler arrives in Pastrana just as darkness is falling. . . . It is a poor time to have reached the town. . . . The morning light is preferable and more propitious for this matter of wandering through a town, talking with people, taking a good look at things, and writing down an occasional note or impression in a notebook.
—Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria
He saw all the noble city.
—Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
After five years' adventuring in the great world, Diego returned to Teruel, entering by the Zaragoza Gate.
—Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Los Amantes de Teruel
(The Lovers of Teruel) quoted by Michener in Iberia
They rode out in open carriages through the park and past the villas of the suburbs.
—Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story
If you lie in the grass at night, you feel it in your bones that the earth is a sphere and that we are flying.—Bertolt Brecht
But the tragic nature of the writer is that if he doesn't put into a book everything he knows, he hasn't done his job. And if you put everything you know into a book what is there left? You had better turn to greener pastures, hadn't you?
—James A. Michener, Saturday Review, 4 May 1968
How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.
—Thomas Huxley, when Darwin's theory was explained to him
(courtesy of Jonathan Ostrowsky's tagline on Archives listserv)
Any sleeping bag should be aired after use. . . . Outdoor airing, especially in sunshine, seems best. Purists will warn you that sunlight is nylon's archenemy. Technically, they may be right. But life is too bloody short.
—Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker III
If you're in control, you're not going fast enough.
—Mario Andretti (thanks to Lee Stout on Archives listserv)
Only one same reason is shared by all of us [novelists]: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator. . . . A planned world is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy. . . . I can only report--and I am the most reliable witness--that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself.
—John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Rompen albores del día
y se acerca la mañana.
Va saliendo el sol.
Dios mio, que hermoso que despuntaba!
* * *
The day is dawning
and morning draws near.
The sun is rising.
My God, how beautiful it is!
—Poema de Mio Cid (anónimo, siglo XII)
Poem of the Cid (anonymous, 12th century)
. . . with the Gorsehill jungle swarming, the violent, impossible birds and fishes leaping, hidden under four-stemmed flowers the height of horses, in the early evening in a dingle near Carmarthen . . .
—Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
It's a good life:
The head grows prouder in the light of the dawn,
And friendship thickens in the murmuring dark . . .
—William Butler Yeats, "On Baile's Strand"
"We'll have a sirocco tomorrow," he said. "The weather's changed. The tree'll swell, and so will young girls' breasts--they'll be bursting out of their bodices! Ah! Spring's a rogue! An invention of the devil!"
—Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
El azar es el íntimo ritmo del mundo,
el azar es el alma de la poesia.
* * *
Chance is the intimate rhythm of the world,
chance is the soul of poetry.
—Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla
She bid me take love easy,
as the leaves grow on the tree.
—William Butler Yeats,
"Down by the Salley Gardens"
These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world, for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you, ever. Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur--this lovely world, these precious days . . .
—E. B. White, Charlotte's Web
Love one another,
but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea
between the shores of your souls.
—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
. . . and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
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I opted for writing, which cheers me up and takes me out of whatever hell I happen to be in.
—Ernest Hemingway
That's how I am. There's a devil in me who shouts, and I do what he says. Whenever I feel I'm choking with some emotion, he says: "Dance!" and I dance. And I feel better!
—Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
You've got to show, Perico, not explain.
—Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
—Susan Ertz
Albóndigas! No importa: yo tengo papel!
* * *
Meatballs! It doesn't matter: I have paper!—Jack Oliver, Baton Rouge, 1987
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Proprietor: Larry Lynch, lorenxo@canyonfire.org Updated: 11 Sept 2003 |