Eric Hinkle > Eric's Quotes

“For those of us who were brought up in the creed of respect for humanity, the simple encounters that can sometimes change into almost miraculous experiences mean a great deal. Respect for humanity...that is the touchstone! When the Nazi respects only what resembles him, he merely respects himself. He rejects the creative contradictions, ruins any hope of advance, and for the next thousand years replaces man with the robot in the anthill.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Lettre à un otage

“It is true that technical progress in modern times has linked men together like a complex nervous system. The means of travel are numerous and communication is instantaneous - we are joined together materially like the cells of a single body, but this body has as yet no soul. This organism is not yet aware of its unity as a whole.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944: Personal Letters and Meditations of a WWII Aviator

“When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.”
― William Saroyan, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot

“I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.”
― Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 04

“Somewhere along the way we have gone astray. The human anthill is richer than ever before. We have more wealth and more leisure, and yet we lack something essential, which we find it difficult to describe. We feel less human; somewhere we have lost our mysterious prerogatives.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944: Personal Letters and Meditations of a WWII Aviator

“When human beings are involved, statistics become a frightful game that I cannot play. People have said to me: 'But what are a few dozen casualties compared to the whole population?' 'Does it matter that a few churches have burned down since the city has survived?' These measurements I reject. The kingdom of man is not to be surveyed in this way.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Sense Of Life

“The traveler who crosses a mountain in the direction of a star runs the risk of forgetting which is his guiding star if he concentrates too exclusively on the climbing problems. If he only acts for action's sake, he will get nowhere.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Lettre à un otage

“How does life build the vital currents that we live from? Where does the magnetic force that pulls me toward this friend's house originate? What are the essential moments that made this presence into a vital pole for me? What are the secret events that mold particular affections and, through them, love of country? How little stir the real miracles cause! How simple are the most vital events! There is so little to say about the instant I want to recall that I have to relive it in a dream and speak to this friend.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Lettre à un otage

“Respect for humanity! Respect for humanity! If such respect is rooted in the human heart, humanity will eventually establish a social, political, or economic system that reflects it. A civilization is before all else rooted in its substance. At first this was a blind urge for warmth. Then by trial and error man found the way to the fire.
That is probably why, my friend, I have such need of your friendship. I need a companion who - beyond the struggles of reason - respects in me the pilgrim on his way to that fire. I sometimes need to feel the promised warmth ahead of time and to rest somewhere beyond myself in that meeting place that will be ours. [...] Beyond the clumsiness of my words, beyond my defective reasoning, you are ready to see me as a human being. You are ready to honor in me the representative of beliefs, customs, loves. If I differ from you, far from wronging you, I enrich you. You question me as you would a traveler.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Lettre à un otage

“How difficult it is to advance at one's own internal rhythm when one is constantly fighting against the inertia of the material world. Everything is always on the verge of stopping.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944: Personal Letters and Meditations of a WWII Aviator

“Admittedly, there's a certain coarseness about [businessmen]; for there's no point in even trying to be [one] unless your love for money is so absolute that you're ready to accompany it on the walk to a double suicide. For money, believe you me, is a hard mistress, and none of her lovers are let off lightly. As a matter of fact, I've just been visiting a businessman and, according to him, the only way to succeed is to practice the "triangled" technique: try to escape your obligations, annihilate your kindly feelings, and geld yourself of the sense of shame.”
― Soseki Natsume

“Tenderness can be born only of respect for individualities. Tenderness builds its nest in little things, in the absurdities of a face, in personal crotchets. When we lose a friend, it is probably his faults that we mourn.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Sense Of Life

“Inside the narrow skull of the miner pinned beneath the fallen timber, there lives a world. Parents, friends, a home, the hot soup of evening, songs sung on feast days, loving kindness and anger, perhaps even a social consciousness and a great universal love, inhabit that skull. By what are we to measure the value of a man? His ancestor once drew a reindeer on the wall of a cave; and two hundred thousand years later that gesture still radiates. It stirs us, prolongs itself in us. Man's gestures are an eternal spring. Though we [may] die for it, we shall bring up that miner from his shaft. Solitary he may be, universal he surely is.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Sense Of Life

“In my mind's eye I can still see the first night flight I made in Argentina. It was pitch-dark. Yet in the black void, I could see the lights of man shining down below on the plains, like faintly luminous earthbound stars. Each star was a beacon signaling the presence of a human mind. Here a man was meditating on human happiness, perhaps, or on justice or peace. Lost among this flock of stars was the star of some solitary shepherd. There, perhaps, a man was in communication with the heavens, as he labored over his calculations of the nebula of Andromeda. And there, a pair of lovers. These fires were burning all over the countryside, and each of them, aven the most humble, had to be fed. The fire of the poet, of the teacher, of the carpenter. But among all these living fires, how many closed windows there were, how many dead stars, fires that gave off no light for lack of nourishment.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Sense Of Life

“Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Sense Of Life

“A true book is like a net, and words are the mesh. The nature of the mesh matters relatively little. What matters is the live catch the fisherman draws up from the depths of the sea, the flashings of silver that we see gleam within the net.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Sense Of Life

“You see - the moulded whimsy of a frieze
on a portico keeps us from recognizing,
sometimes, the symmetry of the whole...
You will leave; we'll forget one another;
but now and then the name of a street,
or a street organ weeping in the twilight,
will remind us in a more vivid and more
truthful way than thought could resurrect
or words convey, of that main thing
which was between us, the main thing which
we do not know ... And in that hour, the soul
will miraculously sense the charm
of past trifles, and we will understand
that in eternity all is eternal”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Tragedy of Mister Morn

“We loved - and it has all gone, somewhere...
We loved - and now our love is frozen,
and now it lies, one wing spread out, raising
its little feet - a dead sparrow on the damp
gravel... But we loved... we flew...”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Tragedy of Mister Morn

“...My taut heart
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Tragedy of Mister Morn

“If only
it were possible to juicily belch up the life
one's lived, chew it anew and gulp it down,
and then once more to roll it with a fat,
ox-like tongue, to squeeze from its eternal
dregs the former sweetness of crisp grass,
drunk with the morning dew and the bitterness
of lilac leaves!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Tragedy of Mister Morn

“The Americans have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives.”
― William Saroyan, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot

“In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, 'One of those things,' impelling me to remark to my cousin, 'Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn't time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel that he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it's being written.”
― William Saroyan, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot

“Eating cherries on a hot July afternoon in Michigan is one of the greatest things that can happen to anybody, and here it is right now - three minutes after three - happening to ME, and to you.”
― William Saroyan, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot

“This is a hell of a night. I don't want to leave it just to go to sleep.”
― William Saroyan, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot

“The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?”
― William Saroyan, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot

“There is no real freedom for the man who is in so much of a hurry that he is annoyed by the human race and by the hot glaring afternoon sun.”
― William Saroyan, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot

“You cannot read Dickens without putting in a little more effort. You cannot eat a ripe pawpaw without its innards and juice spilling down your chin. Likewise, the language of Dickens makes your mouth do strange things, and when you're not used to his words your jaw will creak.”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

“I was one of those heart seeds us kids had heard about in class. I was at some earlier stage of a journey that would deliver me to another place, to another life, into another way of being. I just didn't know where or when.”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

“Pip is an orphan who is given the chance to create his own self and destiny. Pip's experience also reminds us of the emigrant's experience. Each leaves behind the place he grew up in. Each strikes out on his own. Each is free to create himself anew. Each is also free to make mistakes...”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

“That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake