Quotes and a thought

Bear with me...

Henry James appears, in this quote from this article , to be on the "Art", not the "Theory" side:

"We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple—to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded."

Well said; Nabokov couldn't have said it better. It is a writer's article, whether or not you like James, one of the better recent critical ones in the NYorker. My fellow cultured barbarians should remember that James loved Kipling, and Hemingway, who read everything, loved with whatever reservations Henry James.

On the other other hand, I am reminded of a sort of koan by Bron Fullington back in the Seventies: "American culture is a duel between the two sets of James brothers..."

"Keep on ridin' ridin' ridin'..." (Warren Zevon, who also read everything)

True Writing Quote

From Ron Hansen, quoting John Gardner:

"My favorite piece of advice for beginning writers comes from John Gardner, that you should write the fiction you like to read. We immediately recognize phoniness or when a writer’s heart isn’t in the material."

Quote

This one is the only one by Bertholdt Brecht I like, at least outside of his collaborations with Kurt Weill, and one of only two great quotes by diehard Marxists I can remember. Anyone know the other? Hint: it was by the most interesting old Commie ever...

Brecht, though:

"Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?"

Two for the Books

From Joe  Queenan's bibliophile's memoir One for the Books:

"Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful."

"I love to pull my books down off the shelf and read striking passages to baffled dimwits who have turned up at my house."

Good Book Quotes

From Joe Queenan's One For The Books:

"I love to pull my books down off the shelf and read striking passages to baffled dimwits who have turned up at my house."

And:

""Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful."

Hilarious...

.. and irreverent true quote, by Rob Macfarlane (who is as fond of Paddy Leigh Fermor as I am):

"This was the man whom the travel writer Robert Macfarlane, reviewing Ms. Cooper’s book in The Guardian, called “a mixture of Peter Pan, Forrest Gump, James Bond and Thomas Browne.”

Guest Quotes-- Teddy Moritz

Teddy writes:

"Just finished a book by Christine Byl titled 'Dirt Work, An Education in the Woods'. This woman worked summers on trail maintenance in Glacier National Park, and in several parks in Alaska. She talks about the grunt work, the digging and clearing and loading and discomfort of physical work. She loved it all. Money was not the reward, the work in a beautiful place and the physical satisfaction of tired muscles was. One conclusion she reaches is that 'Labor is the process of birthing. If you push hard enough, labor delivers.' Great quote if you've ever given birth!

"However, another quote anyone who has built anything, worked with tools or just cobbled something together can appreciate is this one:

" "Some of the best advice I've ever gotten regarding upward mobility came from Joel, a co-worker in Denali: 'Duct tape can get you through times without money a lot better than money can get you through times without duct tape.'"   Well said!


I assume you all know Teddy, who bred our Lilly, and other treeing dachshunds...

Quote

"I am not a huge fan of Rimbaud’s work, though I respect him for dropping it all and becoming a coffee trader and arms dealer in north Africa."

(Micah Mattix)

Two Quotes

Another Marcus Aurelius, quoted by Philip Caputo in Ghosts of Tsavo:

"When Thou risest reluctantly in the morning, let this thought be present: I am rising to do the work of a human being."

And one from Federico Calboli:
"... Stuff is eaten by dogs, broken by family and friends, sanded down by the wind, frozen by the mountains, lost by the prairie, burnt off by the sun, washed away by the rain. So you are left with dogs, family, friends, sun, rain, wind, prairie and mountains. What more do you want?"

A quote or two

From Gerry Cox: "There's a saying in the world of antique furniture, 'The only substitute for knowledge is money, a lot of money.' "  Of course the reverse is also true-- see the gun featured just a post or two above...

 Not at ALL "By the Way"; Gerry has joined two of our inner guns- books- dogs- food discussion circle (me and James Caldwell, The Old Gunkie) in blogging. His Hits and Misses does something unique in the blog world: he has successive posts on Rossini and how to build a Scout (or as he insists "woods") rifle on a Mauser action Check it out! His thoughtful book about big game hunting will be coming this fall- watch this space.

From the late indispensable Vicki Hearne via Blue Dog State: "". . .[T]here is something more to animals. A capacity for satisfactions that come from work in the fullest sense -- what is known in philosophy and in this country's Declaration of Independence as "happiness." . . . Happiness is often misunderstood as a synonym for pleasure or as an antonym for suffering."  This one will get header space down the line.

Quotes

Courtesy of emeritus zoologist and Ice Age maven Valerius Geist:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

"The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse."

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

(All from H. L. Mencken).

Quotes on Boooks and Writing

From Larry McMurtry:

"The reader might well ask why this account of the expanding and contracting of my various libraries matters at all.

"I could give several answers to the question but the simplest one is that you write what you've read, to a large degree-- and, just as importantly, you write what you will someday reread. I am now entering the time of rereading and am assembling the hundred books or so that I keep with me tore read as long as I'm here.These are the books that, over about six decades, have meant the most tome; it is because of their combined weight and tone that I have become the kind of writer  I now am."

Except for the number-- I would at a younger 63 find that impossible-- yes.  And the same incidentally for firearms... though well LESS than 100 there!

And from Malcolm Brooks:

""...to poach from J. Frank Dobie,, I guess I try to be an aristocrat in taste, but a democrat in principle... I'm glad I can be moved to tears by Dylan, or Dylan Thomas, or Thomas McGuane, or have my socks knocked off by all manner of things that somehow get into the realm of the ineffable IT. A fluted Clovis point. A Rodin.   A Harley panhead. A girl in a sundress.

"I don't think anyone can achieve perfection, but I pretty much bow to the small number of people in this gloriously messy world who strive to. Somebody asked me not long ago who my heroes were, and I said Teddy Roosevelt and Keith Richards.  From this particular vantage in history, I can't see the contradiction."

Stay tuned...

Another Quote

From Sean Sexton's Blood Writing, attributed to "Anon.", in a small seafood restaurant in the Yucatan:

Ama la vida a la frontala, porque buena y mala, sola tenemos una.

(Love life and face it, because good or bad, we have only one)

Quote

...a step ahead of the banker,

a moment behind convention,

putting off heaven and hell

as long as possible.

--from Blood Writing, by Sean Sexton

UPDATE:
The poet sends his picture, in his Querencia, and a painting. I'd love to see that place. Meanwhile, get his book!

Curmudgeonly Quotes and Related Matters

A :Dave Petzal, Field & Stream's resident curmudgeon (and the main if not only reason to read that mag any more) was asked why he had such a bad attitude. He responded:

"Because I have had the opportunity to observe human beings for seven decades, and if you do it for that long and don't have a foul disposition, either you're simple or you haven't been paying attention."


Exhibit B, from The Selected Letters of William Styron, quoting his friend Irwin Wallace: "...no magazine is happy unless they remove the gonads from a writer's work."


C is merely melancholy, on the recent suicide of a hacker, from the pseudonymous "Mencius Moldbug": "No one ever had a chance to tell him that his only honorable option was to live in the past."


D is a headline in one of our main contemporary sporting mags, on hunting rare animals in a fenced preserve and using the money for conservation; I have some esthetic reservations and traditional ones, but my most severe might be... grammatical.* Can NO one see obvious mistakes anymore? The title reads: EXOTIC AND EXTICT.


E, the last for now, courtesy of John Wilson but quoting Ohio naturalist Tom Schied, says more about the originator's wit than the quality of the recipients. Or, well, maybe not-- it is one of those things you wish you had said. Describing to John Wilson (below) the non- joy of casting pearls of wisdom in front of the invincibly ignorant, he spoke of a pair to whom he had shown what Andrey Kovalenko calls a "World Class Bird", only to find them bored and impatient to turn on the radio and move on: John, it was like... it was like showing your stamp collection to an iguana."

*Fairly recently a young editor asked me the source of the phrase "The way of an eagle in the air". I gave the answer as King James Version, such and such book, chapter, verse etc. The person-- I do not know whether male or female but I am sure young, responded as though I were an idiot with "NO-- what BOOK? WHO WROTE IT?"

UPDATE: Libby just read this. As regular readers know, she works for the Post Office, a source of tales of humor and horror second only to the Zoo. She instantly cited a customer, a teacher no less, who when she got to the head of the line asked "How much is a two- cent stamp?"

Dog Quote

"Dogs are like people. Not too literally, of course, but in the sense that the dog population contains a virtually infinite range of individuals – distinctive in physical structure, temperament and past experience. As a group, they are more loyal, more forgiving, more generous, yet less neurotic than people. Our relationship with each of them will be different; and it will be dynamic and change every day. We can make many generalizations about dogs, just as we can about people; but we must be thankful, rather than upset, when something works with one dog and doesn't with another. It is this powerful range of individual variation that makes bird dogs of sustaining interest for a lifetime."

Earl Crangle, via Daniel Riviera

True Writing Quote

From Walter Hingley:

"Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper."

E B White, Paris Review interview

One More Quote

From Jules Older, The Writer's Lifeguard:

"Job applications used to routinely ask you for your hobbies. I always proudly answered, 'None.' I'm a man with goals and dreams, passions and projects, not hobbies. Real writers don’t do hobbies."

Found Quote

From an article called "The Hound and the Fury" in Esquire for April, 1985, the travel issue; by Alan Furst, now our finest spy novelist, specializing in WW II and before:

"Once you own a sight hound-- Afghan, Borzoi, Saluki, greyhound, and whippet and some of the others-- you are addicted for life."

Russian Quote

From the NYT, courtesy of Reid:

"... gun control in Russia is less strict than in some other former Soviet countries. Estonia, for example, proscribes carrying a weapon while drunk. “If they did that here, well, nobody would hunt,” said Igor V. Anisimov, the Izhmash director of foreign sales."