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Gleaned from Recent Reading
By Linda
Mason Hunter
Mid-November, 2010
I’ve
been reading up a storm lately, mostly memoirs and books
about writing. Two books I recently finished are Annie Dilliard’s The Writing Life and John Updike’s 1989
memoir Self Consciousness. I’ve stumbled across some
great quotes.
Here’s a sampling: "Nothing
on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move
back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more."
--Annie
Dilliard, The Writing Life
"We
should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each
other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show."
--Annie
Dillard, The Writing Life
“Henry
James the elder had trouble enunciating, for after meeting him in 1843 Carlyle
wrote to Emerson, ‘He confirms an observation of mine, which indeed I find is
hundreds of years old, that a stammering man is never a worthless one.
Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility
to the presence of his fellow creatures that makes him stammer.”
--John Updike,
Self Consciousness
“I envision my paternal
grandfather as having been, like me, bookish and keen to stay out of harm’s way;
we aspired to the clerisy, and the price that we pay, we Americans who shyly
wish to live by our eyes and wits, at our desks, away from the frightening
tussle of human strength and appetite and intimidation and persuasiveness, is
marginality: we live chancily, on society’s crumbs in a sense, as an exchange
for our exemption from the broad brawl of, to give it a name, salesmanship.”
-- John Updike, Self Consciousness
"Only truth is useful, holy."
-- John Updike, Self Consciousness
“Can
the sweetness of riddance extend to everything? Emerson wrote in his
journals: 'Old age brings along with its ugliness the comfort that you will
soon be out of it—which ought to be a substantial relief to such
discontented pendulums as we are. To be out of the war, out of debt, our of
the drouth, out of the blues, out of the dentist’s hands, out of the second
thoughts, mortifications, and remorses that inflict such twinges and
shooting pains—out of the next winter, and the high prices, and company
below your ambitions—surely these are soothing hints. And, harbinger of
this, what an alleviator is sleep, which muzzles all these dogs for me every
day.'"
-- John Updike, Self Consciousness
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