Twentieth Century Quotes

“The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.”
― H.H. Munro (Saki), The Chronicles of Clovis

“How much of twentieth-century poetry, how much of my own poetry, is the cry of the damned?”
― Christian Wiman

“Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.”
― Peter Sloterdijk

“And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board, and gangster rap.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Washington reflected bitterly. He was short of money, gunpowder, shot, and food. All he had going for him was The Cause, the Rights of Man. Very noble and all that. But just add a whiff of money, gunpowder, shot, and food, and the old Cause might really click. Congress had pledged more help, of course, which, knowing Congress, meant that the aid might come in a decade or so, after the war was lost. He sighed and gazed heavenward. Was a tiny miracle too much to ask?”
― James Allen Moseley, The Duke of D.C.: The American Dream

“¡Dios bendiga los tiempos antiguos, en que existían cosas raras...!”
― Knut Hamsun, Trilogía del vagabundo

“...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.”
― William H. Gass

“Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.”
― Whitaker Chambers

“The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that I have submitted to it all; worse, I have loved with all my heart.”
― Jean Lorrain, Monsieur de Phocas

“When I came out into the outside room again, I saw her shoe still lying there, where it had come off in the course of our brief wrestle. It looked so pathetic there by itself without an owner, it looked so lonely, it looked so empty. Something made me pick it up arid take it in to her. Like when someone's going away, you help them on with their coat, or their jackboots, or whatever it is they need for going away.

I didn't try to put it back on her, I just set it down there beside her close at hand. You're going to need this, I said to her in my mind. You're starting on a long walk. You're going to keep walking from now on, looking for your home.

I stopped and wondered for a minute if that was what happened to all of us when we crossed over. Just keep walking, keep on walking, with no ahead and no in-back-of; tramps, vagrants in eternity. With our last hope and horizon - death - already taken away.

In the Middle Ages they had lurid colors, a bright red hell, an azure heaven shot with gold stars. They knew where they were, at least. They could tell the difference. We, in the Twentieth, we just have the long walk, the long walk through the wispy backward-stringing mists of eternity, from nowhere to nowhere, never getting there, until you're so tired you almost wish you were alive again. ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" - first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER)”
― Cornell Woolrich

“The Oreo cookie invented, the Titanic sinks, Spanish flu, Prohibition, women granted the right to vote, Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic, penicillin invented, stock market crashes, the Depression, Amelia Earhart, the atom is split, Prohibition ends, Golden Gate Bridge is built, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Korean War, Disneyland, Rosa Parks, Laika the dog is shot into space, hula hoops, birth control pill invented, Bay of Pigs, Marilyn Monroe dies, JFK killed, MLK has a dream, Vietnam War, Star Trek, MLK killed, RFK killed, Woodstock, the Beatles (George, Ringo, John, and Paul) break up, Watergate, the Vietnam War ends, Nixon resigns, Earth Day, Fiddler on the Roof, Olga Korbut, Patty Hearst, Transcendental Meditation, the ERA, The Six Million Dollar Man.
"Bloody hell," I said when she was done.
"I know. It must be a lot to take in."
"It's unfathomable. A Brit named his son Ringo Starr?"
She looked pleasantly surprised: she'd thought I had no sense of humor.
"Well, I think his real name was Richard Starkey.”
― Melanie Gideon, Valley of the Moon

“The horror of the twentieth century was the size of each new event and the paucity of its reverberation”
― Norman Miller

“We’d gotten off on the subject of writers―from T.H. White and Tolkien to Edgar Allan Poe, another favorite. “My dad says Poe’s a second-rate writer,” I said. “That he’s the Vincent Price of American Letters. But I don’t think that’s fair.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Hobie, seriously pouring himself a cup of tea. “Even if you don’ like Poe―he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century. I mean―honestly, I don’t care as much for him as I did as when I was a boy, but even if you don’t like him you can’t dismiss him as a crank.”


We’d gotten off on the subject of writers―from T.H. White and Tolkien to Edgar Allan Poe, another favorite. “My dad says Poe’s a second-rate writer,” I said. “That he’s the Vincent Price of American Letters. But I don’t think that’s fair.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Hobie, seriously pouring himself a cup of tea. “Even if you don’ like Poe―he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century. I mean―honestly, I don’t care as much for him as I did as when I was a boy, but even if you don’t like him you can’t dismiss him as a crank.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“We’d gotten off on the subject of writers―from T.H. White and Tolkien to Edgar Allan Poe, another favorite. “My dad says Poe’s a second-rate writer,” I said. “That he’s the Vincent Price of American Letters. But I don’t think that’s fair.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Hobie, seriously pouring himself a cup of tea. “Even if you don’ like Poe―he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century. I mean―honestly, I don’t care as much for him as I did as when I was a boy, but even if you don’t like him you can’t dismiss him as a crank.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“We’d gotten off on the subject of writers―from T.H. White and Tolkien to Edgar Allan Poe, another favorite. “My dad says Poe’s a second-rate writer,” I said. “That he’s the Vincent Price of American Letters. But I don’t think that’s fair.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Hobie, seriously pouring himself a cup of tea. “Even if you don’t like Poe―he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century. I mean―honestly, I don’t care as much for him as I did as when I was a boy, but even if you don’t like him you can’t dismiss him as a crank.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Nobody would call Miss Democracy anything but a plain girl, but when one compares her with the hags to whom millions are expected to pay court, she seems a very Helen.”
― W.H. Auden

“England,' 'La France,' 'Das Reich;' their words
Are like the names of extinct birds
Or peasant-women's quaint old charms
For bringing lovers to their arms,
Which would be only pretty save
That they bring thousands to their grave.”
― W.H. Auden

“One of the best reasons I have for knowing That Fascism is bogus is that it is too much like the kinds of Utopias artists plan over cafe tables very late at night.”
― W.H. Auden

“Education, all smoothly say, is the production of useful citizens. But, good God, what on earth is a useful citizen just now?”
― W.H. Auden

“She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.

What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful not in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.

On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes the caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“Last century we looked out, this one just in. We went to the moon, for Christ’s sake.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Twentieth century art unambiguously proclaims that the standards and conventions of beauty accepted by all Christian people in bygone eras have been wholeheartedly rejected— not edited and refined but degraded and discarded.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“گداخانه، به راستی یکی از آن مؤسساتی است که بر پایه ی خرافات مقدس و ریاکاری وقیحانه پا گرفته است. به این ترتیب ثروتمندها وجدان شان را مفت و مجانی آرام می کنند، و گداها مسکن فوری آرامش این وجدانند.”
― Ivo Andrić, The Woman from Sarajevo