Frederick Turner > Quotes

“Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.”
― Frederick Turner

“The color and shape of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive”
― Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

“Andrew Jackson was both mind and muscle united into the essential personality of the Pioneer. He was shrewd, practical and courageous. He also hated Indians and had no interest in land except as it could be turned to what were then styled the "arts of civilization," i.e., agriculture and industry.”
― Frederick Turner

“Jazz as Herman has come to it is part of the big come-on. Get ‘em in and get ‘em loaded. Get ‘em loaded and get ‘em laid. Get ‘em laid and get ‘em out. And all the while the band made noise, laid down the beat. When you got laid, you jazzed your girl, but you didn’t want to the hit the street with jazz still on our pants… and, what the hell, jazz is jazz… and the dance floor and the tables, too, completely filled and the temperature going up and up, the faces of the dancers shining with sweat and excitement. Because they’ve surrendered as well, all of them, the booze beginning to take hold, its toxic contents roaring through their veins, mounting into the heads topped with brilliantined hair or bobbed, the girls’ cheeks flushed like rose petals and the flush creeping down their swanlike necks, past the strings of paste that for tonight are agreed to be the real thing.”
― Frederick Turner

“Jazz as Herman has come to know it is part of the big come-on. Get ‘em in and get ‘em loaded. Get ‘em loaded and get ‘em laid. Get ‘em laid and get ‘em out. And all the while the band made noise, laid down the beat. When you got laid, you jazzed your girl, but you didn’t want to the hit the street with jazz still on our pants… and, what the hell, jazz is jazz… and the dance floor and the tables, too, completely filled and the temperature going up and up, the faces of the dancers shining with sweat and excitement. Because they’ve surrendered as well, all of them, the booze beginning to take hold, its toxic contents roaring through their veins, mounting into the heads topped with brilliantined hair or bobbed, the girls’ cheeks flushed like rose petals and the flush creeping down their swanlike necks, past the strings of paste that for tonight are agreed to be the real thing.”
― Frederick Turner, 1929