favorite quotes: Montaigne says...

"The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself."

          Montaigne

Favorite quotes: ...Oscar de la Renta

"...they make my dresses look young.  And this generation seems to understand that a well-lived life is a question of attitude.  It takes a lot of discipline.  That is true of fashion as well."
  
          Oscar de la Renta

Favorite quotes: ...Victor Frankel

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing:  the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

        Victor Frankel

Favorite quotes: ...but I don't know who said it...

"Every narrative arises from one of two situations:  someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town"

A reliable source tells me that the quote is by John Gardener

??

Favorite quotes: Life is not long...

"Life is not long and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent."

 Samuel Johnson

Rat's Country: I'll cheer up, soon.

 Like that creature from the Black Lagoon, what was his name, I rise from the mire of my own emotions to light a candle, then blow it out.

Favorite quotes: Every writer...works differently...

"Every writer of course works differently, but I suspect that most novels begin in their writers' minds as confusions of images, impulses, scattered meanings, devotions, grudges, fixations, and some vague sort of plot, to name just a few."


      from Michael Cunningham's introduction to a new translation ofThomas Mann's Death in Venice

Favorite quotes: A good place to look for wisdom...

"A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it:  in the minds of your opponents."

Jonathan Haidt,  The Happiness Hypothesis

Favorite quotes: Retirement is...

"To begin, it is an immediate, and usually irrevocable, step into second-class citizenship.  Once retired, you are one with blacks, Hispanics, the handicapped, homosexuals, jailbirds, the insane, the retarded, children and women:  America's Third World hordes.  America doesn't like oldpeople, and retired people are old people, whether they are 45, 55 or 65.  old people clutter up the landscape.  Their families do't want them.  Their communities do't want them.  They are a nightmare vision of everyone's future.  They are of interest mainly to doctors and hospitals, real-estate brokers and travel agents--but not as people, rather as bodies from whom some final payment can still be exacted..."

"The First Step to the Cemetery" by Kenneth Bernard  Newsweek, February 22, 1982

        

Favorite quotes, sort of: "It doesn't bode well..."

"Sometimes it's easy to tell when a romantic relationship is about to take a dive.  It doesn't bode well if you would rather sort socks than go out on a date or if neither of you can think of much to say.  Another bad sign is when--consciously or not--you associate your lover with words like "death" and "attacking."

"Telltale Heart, A test of hidden attitudes predicts relationship decay," Scientific American Mind, Nov. Dec. 2010.

First sentences: Eugenie Grandet

In certain provincial towns there are houses which create a feeling of melancholy equal to that aroused by the gloomiest cloisters, the bleakest moorland, or the most mournful ruins.

Eugenie Grandet by Honore De Balzac

Rat's Country: the most famous November rumination

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul: whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick