Notable Excerpts

06 Mar 2017 - Berkeley, CA

Excerpt from All the Pretty Horses

(Duena Alfonsa) We’ll see what fate has in store for us, won’t we?
(John Grady Cole) I thought you didn’t believe in fate.
She waved her hand.
(Duena Alfonsa) It’s not so much that I don’t believe in it - I don’t subscribe to its nomination. If fate is the law, then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility - it’s in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.

by Cormac McCarthy, American Writer and Author of Novels

Excerpt from Remarks at the University of Kansas (Mar. 18, 1968)

And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

by Robert F. Kennedy, Former United States Attorney General

Excerpt from Letter to Mrs. Bixby (Nov. 21, 1864)

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

by Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President

Excerpts from Macbeth

Whence is that knocking?—
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

–Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2

A little water clears us of this deed.
How easy is it, then! Your constancy
Hath left you unattended.

–Lady Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2

Out, damned spot! Out, I say!—One, two. Why,
then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky!—Fie, my
lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our
power to account?—Yet who would have
thought the old man to have had so much
blood in him.

–Lady Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1

by William Shakespeare, English Playwright

Excerpt from Ulysses (1842) 54-62

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends.

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, English Poet

Excerpt from House of Leaves

…la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. (…truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.) –Miguel de Cervantes, Writer [from Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter Nine, according to Page 42 of the remastered full-color edition of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, copyright 2000]

…the habit of photographic seeing – of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs – creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature. –Susan Sontag, On Photography from House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Truth transcends the telling. –Ino from House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer. –The Courage to Withstand by Daphne Kaplan from House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share. –March 14, 1969 entry

Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you? –February 11, 1984 entry

Stars to live by. Stars to steer by. Stars to die by. –May 3, 1991 entry

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say. –July 27, 1991 entry

Explanation is not half as strong as experience but experience is not half as strong as experience and understanding. –December 21, 1996 entry

I took my morning walk, I took my evening walk, I ate something, I thought about something, I wrote something, I napped and dreamt something too, and with all that something, I still have nothing because so much of sum’things has always been and always will be you. I miss you. –December 23, 1996

Seeing’s believing but feeling’s probably best. –September 17, 1978 entry

Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind. –(Untitled Fragment)

You shall be my roots and
I will be your shade,
though the sun burns my leaves.
You shall quench my thirst and
I will feed you fruit,
though time takes my seed.
And when I’m lost and can tell nothing of this earth,
you will give me hope.
And my voice you will always hear.
And my hand you will always have.
For I will shelter you.
And I will comfort you.
And even when we are nothing left,
not even in death,
I will remember you. –You Shall Be My Roots

by Mark Z. Danielewski, American Author

Excerpt from The Laws of Thermodynamics

On Boltzmann’s expression: At a given temperature - in the bulk sense - a collection of atoms consists of some in their lowest energy state (their “ground state”), some in the next higher energy state, and so on, with populations that diminish in progressively higher energy states. When the populations of the states have settled down into their “equilibrium” populations, although atoms continue to jump between energy levels, there is no net change in the populations [and] it turns out that these populations can be calculated from a knowledge of the energies of the states and a single parameter, beta.

More on The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Time moves towards increasing one direction: increasing entropy.

by Peter Atkins, English Chemist

Source: https://www.perell.com/blog/50-ideas-that-changed-my-life/

Excerpt from The Sunset Limited

White:

The one thing I wont give up is giving up. I expect that to carry me through. I’m depending on it. The things I believed in were very frail. As I said. They wont be around for long and neither will I. But I dont think that’s really the reason for my decision. I think it goes deeper. You can acclimate yourself to loss. You have to. You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt mean anything. You’ve become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy.

Black:

The light is all around you, cept you dont see nothin but shadow. And the shadow is you. You the one makin it.

You must love your brother or die.

If it aint what you lost that is more than you can bear then maybe it’s what you wont lose. What you’d rather die than to give up.

I dont believe that the world can be better than what you allow it to be. Dark as a world as you live in, they aint goin to be a whole lot of surprises in the way of good news.

by Cormac McCarthy, American Writer