“I do not believe that there was in that genteel Bohemia an intensive culture of chastity, but I do not remember so crude a promiscuity as seems to be practised [sic.] in the present day.”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 13.
“A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces of new scenes to fill up the gap. . . . You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
George Ballmer, a fellow-sailor, is working high above the deck of a ship on the maintop masthead, when he falls into the ocean with his equipment. He is lost completely; Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative (New York: Signet, 2000), 31.
“We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly.”
Sometimes boredom gets the best of us and, like Maugham, we need to change locations (in his case, from London to Paris). W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 63.
“What I needed was flying. . . . I needed to fly so much that my subconscious mind would become so reconditioned to the air that it would accept it as its natural element.”
Suffering the loss of a loved one, suffering from an inability to sleep, pilot Gordon Taylor believes that flying, his only joy, will become his only life; Gordon Taylor, The Sky Beyond (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 91.
“At the end of his fuel, hopelessly lost in bad weather but still searching for the Hawaiian Islands, Ulm had sent out his last and typically laconic message: ‘We are now landing in the sea. Please come and pick us out.’ Tragically – despite a massive air and sea search – they were not found.”
Charles Ulm and his crew of two others were flying from San Francisco to Honolulu in the 1930s; Gordon Taylor, The Sky Beyond (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 60, n.
“We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all out knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.”
A somber Dirk Stroeve, after his wife leaves him and commits suicide. W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 129-30.
“. . . he knows better than anyone else in baseball how to manage the space between a player’s ears.”
This was said of Cubs manager Dusty Baker; Buzz Bissinger, Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 23.
“Philosophy is not one truth, but thousands of truths. You don’t have to believe in just one thing. When you choose one idea, you close yourself to the rest.”
Marcel Wanders, Dutch industrial designer, Jane Szita, “A Life in Design,” Dwell (April 2006), 23.
“Computers make children advance faster, but they also make them think like computers.”
Describing the effect of computer games; Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (New York: Scribner, 2004), 17.
“Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone’s been missing too long.”
Leif Enger, Peace Like a River (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 54.
