Husky Slacks > Husky's Quotes

“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.”
― Harold Bloom

“One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book:”
― Marcel Proust, In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes)

“He who has a Why can endure any How.”
― Frederick Nietzsche

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--”
― Emily Dickinson

“Fame is the one that does not stay
It's occupant must die
Or out of sight of estimate
Ascend incessantly
Or be that most insolvent thing
A Lightning in the Germ
Electrical the embryo
But we demand the Flame”
― Emily Dickinson

“O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain —
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom —
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm”
― Hart Crane, The Bridge

“Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

- The Song of Wandering Aengus”
― William Butler Yeats, A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. . . . The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semiruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice?”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —
Only this and nothing more.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

“Fleas and lice biting;
awake all night
a horse pissing close to my ear”
― Matsuo Bashō

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“In the cicada's cry
There's no sign that can foretell
How soon it must die.”
― Matsuo Bashō

“Here, where a thousand
captains swore grand conquest…
tall grass their monument”
― Matsuo Bashō

“Clouds come from time to time -
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.”
― Matsuo Bashō

“Falling ill on a journey,
my dreams wander
the withered fields”
― Matsuo Bashō

“Look, don’t kill that fly!
It is making a prayer to you
By rubbing its hands and feet”
― Kobayashi Issa

“In this world
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers”
― Kobayashi Issa

“In these latter-day,
Degenerate times,
Cherry-blossoms everywhere!”
― Kobayashi Issa

“The summer river:
although there is a bridge, my horse
goes through the water”
― Masaoka Shiki

“His Holiness the Abbot
is shitting
in the withered fields”
― Yosa Buson

“Lighting one candle
with another candle-
spring evening”
― Yosa Buson

“A small night storm blows
Saying ‘falling is the essence of a flower’
Preceding those who hesitate”
― Yukio Mishima

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”
― Herman Melville

“It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick: or, the White Whale

“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych