The very rich are a poor bunch of bastards

Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight – the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards. He wondered if that were true. They acted that way sometimes.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) p. 704

Maybe a specialist is only a coward

"Old Sam Hamilton saw this coming. He said there couldn't be any more universal philosophers. The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb. He saw a time when one man would know only one little fragment, but he would know it well."
"Yes," Lee said from the doorway, "and he deplores it. He hated it."
"Did he now?" Adam asked.
[...]
"Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small," said Lee. "Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they're becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses – the whole world over his fence."
"We're only talking about making a living."
"A living – or money," Lee said excitedly. "Money's easy to make if it's money you want. But with few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration."
"All right. But do you have any objection to college? That's what we're talking about."
"I'm sorry," said Lee. "You're right, I do seem to get too excited. No, if college is where a man can go to find his relation to his whole world, I don't object. Is it that?"

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) pp. 652-653

Most of our vices are attempted short cuts to love

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) p. 505

Without memory, time would be unarmed against us

"Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?"
"Maybe you're right," said Adam.
"It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me," said Lee, "that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man."
"And memory."
"Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us."

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) p. 458

The nagging worry of departure

Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. Lost keys, unwritten labels, tissue paper lying on the floor. I hate it all. Even now, when I have done so much of it, when I live, as the saying goes, in my boxes. Even today, when shutting drawers and flinging wide an hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, is a methodical matter of routine, I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof yet we leave something of ourselves behind.Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (Virago Press, 2003) p. 49

The substance of their world was forest

At first on Athshe he had felt oppressed and uneasy in the forest, stifled by its endless crowd and incoherence of trunks, branches, leaves in the perpetual greenish or brownish twilight. The mass and jumble of various competitive lives all pushing and swelling outwards and upwards towards light, the silence made up of many little meaningless noises, the total vegetable indifference to the presence of mind, all this had troubled him, and like the others he had kept to clearings and to the beach.
[...]
So earth, terra, tellus mean both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 72

The world is always new

"The world is always new," said Coro Mean, "however old its roots."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 32

The pursuit of art is the pursuit of liberty

The pursuit of art, then, by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labelling them as "escapism". The captured soldier tunnelling out of prison, the runaway slave, and Solzhenitsyn in exile, are escapists. Aren't they? The definition also helps explain why all healthy children can sing, dance, paint, and play with words; why art is an increasingly important element in psychotherapy; why Winston Churchill painted, why mothers sing cradle-songs, and what is wrong with Plato's Republic.

Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 6

To be myself

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Vintage Books, 2004) p. 75

The lake of my mind

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Vintage Books, 2004) p. 21

The abolition of money

Who can fail to see that fraud, theft, pillaging, disputes, riots, strife, rebellion, murder, treason, poisoning, all those crimes that repeated punishment fails to deter, would die out with the abolition of money. And at the very moment when money vanished, so too would fear, anxiety, grief, stress and wakeful nights; even poverty itself, which seems to be just the lack of money, would instantly vanish if money was completely suppressed.

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin Classics, 2012) pp. 120-121

A conspiracy of the rich

What sort of justice is it when some aristocrat, goldsmith, moneylender or, for that matter, any such individual who either does nothing at all or else something quite remote from the real needs of the commonwealth, enjoys a life of luxury and elegance thanks to his idleness or his inessential services, while at the same time a labourer, a wagoner, an artisan or farm-worker sweats so hard and so long that a beast of burden could scarcely bear it, and at work so essential that no commonwealth could survive for a year without it; yet they earn such pathetic recompense and live such wretched lives that the condition of beasts actually seems preferable, since beasts don't have to toil without a break and their food is scarcely worse – in fact, to them it's more tasty – nor of they fret about the future. But men like these are compelled for the present to labour that brings scant reward, and are haunted by the prospect of a penniless old age, for their daily wage is so far from meeting their current needs that there's no chance of any surplus being put aside that they might rely on when they're old.

Now isn't it an inequitable and selfish society where such rewards are lavished on the nobility (as they're called), and on goldsmiths and others of that sort, who are either parasites, or flatterers, or purveyors of idle pleasures? And where, by contrast, no decent provision is made for farm-workers, or colliers, or labourers, or carters or artisans, without whom the commonwealth couldn't even function? When their best years have been used up in drudgery, when they are word down by age and sickness and are quite destitute, an ungrateful society, disregarding their long hours of work and the extent of their services, repays them with a wretched death. But there's more: the rich are forever fleecing the poor of some of their daily pittance, not only by private fraud but even by official legislation. In this way what initially seemed an injustice, namely that those who deserved most from the commonwealth received least, has now been converted from an abuse into an act of justice by the passing of a law. So when I survey and assess all the different political systems flourishing today, nothing else presents itself – God help me – but a conspiracy of the rich, who look after their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth. They plot and contrive schemes and devices by which, for a start, they can cling on to whatever they have already accumulated by shady means without any fear of losing it, and then take advantage of the poor by acquiring their works and their labour at the lowest possible cost. Once the rich, in the name of the community (and that, of course, includes the poor), have decreed that these fraudulent practices are to be observed, they become laws.

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin Classics, 2012) pp. 119-120

When money is the measure of all things

When money is the measure of all things, futile and unnecessary trades are bound to be practiced, just to meet the demands of luxury and indulgence.

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin Classics, 2012) pp. 65-66

Den njutningsfyllda glädjen över världens skapnad

Aldrig, aldrig ens under ögonblicken av den mest slösande, den mest besinningslösa lycka övergav dem det högsta, det mest överväldigande: den njutningsfyllda glädjen över världens skapnad, känslan av att själva gå in i tavlan, förnimmelsen av att höra in i hela bildens skönhet, i hela universum.

Endast i denna samhörighet med allt levde och andades de. Därför förblev de oberörda av det moderna daltandet med människan, av människoförgudandet och upphöjandes av människan över den övriga naturen. De till politik förvandlade falska principerna om samhällsutvecklingen var för dem ett ömkligt och obegripligt fuskverk.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 553

En enda förblivande konst

Min gamla tanke är att konsten inte är en benämning på en kategori eller ett område, som omfattar en oöverskådlig mängd begrepp och sig förgrenande företeelser, utan tvärtom någonting starkt begränsat och koncentrerat, att den betecknar en grundprincip, som ingår i vad man sammanfattar i begreppet konstnärlig framställning, att den är en benämning på en kraft som där kommer till användning eller på en däri utvecklad sanning. Och konsten har aldrig tyckts mig vara ett formtema, en sida av formen utan fastmer en hemlighetsfull och fördold del av innehållet. Detta är för mig klart som dagen, jag känner det med varje fiber, men hur skall jag uttrycka och klart formulera denna tanke?

Verken kommer till tals på många sätt: genom sina teman, sina teser, sina ämnen och hjältar. Men framför allt talar de genom närvaron av den konst som de innehåller. Konstens närvaro på sidorna i "Brott och Straff" skakar oss mer än Raskolnikovs brott.

Den primitiva konsten, den egyptiska, den grekiska, vår tids konst, allt detta är förvisso under loppet av många årtusenden ett och detsamma, en enda förblivande konst. Den är ett slags tanke, ett slags påstående om livet, som i sin allomfattande vidd inte kan sönderdelas i enstaka ord, och när ett uns av denna kraft ingår som en beståndsdel i en mer komplicerad blandning, kommer tillsatsen av konst att väga upp betydelsen av allt det övriga och visa sig vara den innersta kärnan, själen och grunden i framställningen.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 310