Gary Inbinder > Gary's Quotes

“The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."

(Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)”
― Voltaire

“If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"

Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.”
― Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

“If this was love, love had been overrated.”
― Henry James, The Europeans

“When I am wicked I am in high spirits.”
― Henry James, The Europeans

“Well, I am rather afraid of that visit," said Clifford. "It seems to me it will be rather like going to school again."

The Baroness looked at him a moment.

"My dear child," she said, "there is no agreeable man who has not, at some moment, been to school to a clever woman--probably a little older than himself. And you must be thankful when you get your instructions gratis. With me you would get it gratis.”
― Henry James, The Europeans

“There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.”
― Henry James, The Europeans

“Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people.”
― Henry James, The Europeans

“The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea; she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight.”
― Henry James, The Europeans

“Thank heaven for people who are satisfied with facts that conform to the reality they wish to believe.”
― Gary Inbinder, Confessions of the Creature

“Charlie Black: Fourierism was tried in the late nineteenth century… and it failed. Wasn’t Brook Farm Fourierist? It failed.
Tom Townsend: That’s debatable.
Charlie Black: Whether Brook Farm failed?
Tom Townsend: That it ceased to exist, I’ll grant you, but whether or not it failed cannot be definitively said.
Charlie Black: Well, for me, ceasing to exist is — is failure. I mean, that’s pretty definitive.
Tom Townsend: Well, everyone ceases to exist. Doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure.”
― Whit Stillman, Barcelona and Metropolitan: Tales of Two Cities

“To say "He was a young fool, and now he's an old fool" is to make a distinction without a difference.”
― Gary Inbinder

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”
― George Gordon Byron

“Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Complete Works

“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”
― Honore de Balzac

“Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer’s plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian’s; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl’s ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“It is difficult to understand the universe if you only study one planet”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

“It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.”
― Emile Zola

“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
― Woody Allen

“I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.”
― Woody Allen

“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
― Oscar Levant

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”
― Groucho Marx

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“She wore a loose-fitting purple velvet Pre-Raphaelite gown, and her abundant dark-brown hair flowed down her back and shoulders to her waist. As she drew near, I noticed her warm brown eyes peeping at me beneath lush, un-plucked brows, her smiling red lips and smooth, un-powdered cheeks almost begging for kisses. She possessed a beauty much different from Daisy, more like a wildflower in the unspoiled earth than a prize-winning rose in a formal garden. However, her Pre-Raphaelite fashion might have been an affectation of a different kind, a bit closer to nature but a stylish imitation just the same.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero