Dan > Dan's Quotes

“She endured her own nature and supposed it to be the burden of another's.”
― Charles Williams, Descent into Hell

“Melmotte is really little more than rumor and illusion; his sudden rise is due less to any deep scheming or villainy on his part than to society's apparent inability to enforce its own standards.”
― Robert Tracy, Trollope's Later Novels

“As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes "are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values." Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away.”
― Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Their singing wasn’t particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.”
― William Saroyan, The Human Comedy

“The self has no sign of itself... For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

“Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore?

Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.

Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?

Explain.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

“Man’s collective mastery of nature— even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion— can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life.”
― Christopher Lasch

“Often in even small conversations with strangers I can feel the heat of klieg lights, sense direction being listened for. This can't end well. Having caught each other singing, we are like performers made aware that an identical act is going on one grandstand over-a reminder that there is no audience, only stages, one performer each, each flouncing proudly to his own orchestra.”
― J. Bradford Hipps, The Adventurist