Friday, July 30, 2010

Quotes: Social Interaction (4)


Social interaction          35           "Sir John was loud in his admiration at the end of every song, and as loud in his conversation with the others while every song lasted." Austen, Sense and Sensibility.

Social interaction          162         "…talked of headaches, low spirits, and over fatigues; and of everything to which she could decently attribute her sister’s behavior [for avoiding Col. Brandon]." Austen, Sense and Sensibility.

Social interaction          176         “ 'Pray, pray, be composed,' cried Elinor, 'and do not betray what you feel to everybody present.' " Austen, Sense and Sensibility.

Social interaction          420         "Stanley had discovered that people liked him when he made confessions like that." Mailer, The Naked and the Dead.

Social interaction          84           "After the business of arriving was over…." Austen, Mansfield Park.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Quotes: Social Interaction (3)


 Social interaction          142         "A rebuff or cold look from those who are above us in rank may make us hate them, but a greeting or a smile soon reconciles us." La Bruyere. 1688. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction          209         "If we would please in society, we must be prepared to be taught many things we know already…." Chamfort. 1805. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction          211         "Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of other persons." Twain. Later 19th century. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

14. Social interaction          213         "Every man becomes to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are." Lord Chesterfield. 1750. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction          213         "Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference." Cesare Pavese. 1935-50. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Quotes: Social Interaction (2)


 Social interaction            139         "To be able to live among men and women we must allow everyone to exist with his given individuality." Schopenhauer. 1851. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction            139         "If there were only two men in the world, how would they get on? They would help one another, harm one another, flatter one another…fight one another, make it up; they could neither live together nor do without one another." Voltaire. 1764. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction            140         "In the presence of some people we inevitably depart from ourselves: we are inaccurate, say things we do not feel, and talk nonsense; when we get home we are conscious that we have made fools of ourselves; never go near these people." Mark Rutheford. 1910. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction            141         "Personalize your sympathies; depersonalize your antipathies." W. R. Inge. 1931. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction          142        "Ignorance alone makes monsters or bugbears; our actual acquaintances are all very common-place people." Hazlitt. 1822. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Quotes: Social Interaction (1)


Social interaction            76           "When men are easy in themselves, they let others remain so."" Lord Shaftesbury. 1711. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction            78           "Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else." Gerald Brenan. 1978. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction            78           "To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation." Lichtenberg. 1764-99. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction            79           "The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortunes…." Somerset Maugham. 1919. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Social interaction            79           "There is a certain distance at which each person we know is naturally placed from us…varies with each, and we must not attempt to alter it." Mark Rutherford. 1910. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Quote: Social Hierarchy


Social hierarchy               287         "…there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival called the Sacaea…began on the sixteenth day of the month Lous, and lasted for five days; during these five days masters and servants changed places, the servants giving the orders and the masters obeying them." Frazer, The New Golden Bough.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Quotes: Social Gathering.


 Social gathering               63          " Every one of Mr. Macey’s audience had heard this story many times, but it was listened to as if it had been a favorite tune, and at certain points the puffing of the pipes was momentarily suspended, that the listeners might give their whole minds to the expected words." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social gathering   111         "Whereupon cards followed, with Aunt Kimble’s annual failure to follow suit…." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Quote: Social Custom


 Social custom  287         "A prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king’s concubines…at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled." Frazer, The New Golden Bough.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Quotes: Social Class (2)


Social class       10          " Sir Thomas in anticipation of Fanny’s arrival: there will be some difficulty in our way…as to the distinction proper to be made between the girls as they grow up; how to preserve in the minds of my daughters the consciousness of what they are, without making them think too lowly of their cousin; and how, without depressing her spirits too far, to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram…they cannot be equals…rank, fortune, rights, and expectations, will always be different…a point of great delicacy." Austen, Mansfield Park.

Social class       147         “ 'I am not going to urge her,' –replied Mrs. Norris sharply, 'but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her—very ungrateful indeed, considering who and what she is.' ” Austen, Mansfield Park.

Social class       221         Mrs. Norris to Fanny: "The nonsense and folly of people’s stepping out of their rank and trying to appear above themselves, makes me think it right to give you a hint, Fanny, now that you are going into company without any of us; and I do beseech and entreat you not to be putting yourself forward, and talking and giving your opinion as if you were one of your cousins…". Austen, Mansfield Park.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Quotes: Social Class (1)


 Social class       26           "Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan earnestness: the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social class       36           "The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we are apt to think very prosaic figures--men whose only work was to ride round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles, and who passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by monotony...and then what was left to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt, or for carrying a gun over the furrows, but to drink and get merry, or to drink and get angry, so that they might be independent of variety, and say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already any time that twelvemonth." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social class       86          " ...something in the presence of the old Squire distinguishable from that of the ordinary farmers in the parish, who were perhaps every whit as refined a he, but, having slouched their way through life with a consciousness of being in the vicinity of their 'betters,' wanted that self-possession and authoritativeness which belonged to a man who thought of his superiors as remote existences with whom he had personally little more to do than with America or the stars...had been used to parish homage all his life, used to the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and best...." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social class       199         "…but we must remember that many of the impressions which Godfrey was likely to gather concerning the laboring people around him would favor the idea that deep affection can hardly go along with callus palms and scant means…." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social class       218         Eppie: "I shouldn’t know what to think on or to wish for with fine things about me, as I haven’t been used to…it ‘ud be poor work for me to put on things and ride in a gig, and sit in a place at church, as ‘ud make them as I’m fond of think me unfitting company for ‘em." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

quotes: Snow (2).


Snow  21           "Snow, winter’s own cold, white blossoms…." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Snow  43           "We can split atoms, send rockets to the moon, fly faster than sound, but we still can’t subdue a blizzard." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Snow  341         December. "We can’t create a snowflake...the wonder of the evanescent flakes, so frail they vanish in one warm breath, so substantial they form ice sheets and glaciers." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Snow  345         December. "If [snow] comes wet and clinging, it accents the clean, simple structure of every tree." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Snow               350         "Even such a simple thing as a snow flake or an ice crystal is, in a way, a fragment of universal truth...the infinite variety within a six-fold pattern...is beyond human achievement...the power in an ice crystal manifested in winter dwarfs the energy in a man-fractured atom." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Quotes: Snow (1).


Snow  15           "Perhaps we need the snow to really see the colors." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Snow  15           "The snow may not sharpen the eyes but it does sharpen the contrast and somehow cleanses the colors themselves." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Snow  15           "…and it [snow] simplifies the world around us, hides the confusing clutter, the distractions." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Snow  15           "With less to see [because of the snow], we see more and see it clearly…whoever admired the glistening black of a crow in July?" Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Snow  21           "We stand at the window and see the snow, the flakes of crystal perfection, feathering from the sky, and we remember all the winters of our lives." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Quotes: Smoking.


 Smoking            1057       "…puffing what seemed to be the same cigar that he had lighted twenty years before." Hawthorne: “Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance”

Smoking            331         "The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco." Emerson. 1859. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Smoking            35          "He [Babbitt] stopped smoking at least once a month…went through with it like the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously made resolves; laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to every one he met…did everything, in fact, except stop smoking; two months before, by [making] out a schedule, noting down the hour and minute of each smoke, and ecstatically increasing the intervals between smokes, he had brought himself down to three cigars a day; then he had lost the schedule." Lewis, Babbitt.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Quotes: Small Town (8)


Small town     409         "Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted and guarded Main Street; two-thirds…had come from Gopher Prairies." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     410         "Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     426         "In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were Prohibition, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whiskey at thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the 'high cost of living,' the presidential election, Clark’s new car and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart …problems were exactly what they had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to come." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     438         Mark Schorer, in the Afterword, quoting from the novel: "Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the street was meshed in silence…was but the hum of motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands’ porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen—sounds that were a distilled silence…a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope…no one who was interesting would come by…tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and futility." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town vs. cities     413         "Her glimpse of tasks [in Washington] involving millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to its actual pettiness…could never again be quite so awed by the power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blausers and Bogarts." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Quotes: Small Town (7)

Small town     279         "As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests—he has a jest…for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, 'Fair to middlin’ chilly—get worse before it gets better'…fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, 'Where’d you steal that hat?' ” Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     310         "Miles looked steadily at the three women: 'You’re too late…can’t do nothing now; Bea’s always kind of hoped that you folks would come see her…wanted to have a chance and be friends…used to sit waiting for somebody to knock…seen her sitting here, waiting…oh, you ain’t worth god-damning.'  He shut the door." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

33. Small town     327        " …the back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     327         "Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of cement walk…I wonder how much of the cement is made out of the tombstones of John Keatses?" Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     333         "Tennis was well spoken of in Gopher Prairie and almost never played." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Quotes: Small Town (6)

 Small town     257         [Small American town]: "It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to be respectable …contentment…the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking…a negation canonized as the one positive virtue…the prohibition of happiness…dullness made God." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     258         [American small town]: "A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs…listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles…." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     259         "The cloud of serene ignorance submerges them in unhappiness and futility." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     261         "…Carol saw the fact that the prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment…." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     275         "The incredible dullness of it all…they don’t know what they miss…anybody can endure anything; look at men in mines and in prisons." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Quotes: Small Town (5)


Small town     204          "Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     223         "How bravely and generously it [Gopher Prairie] did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     217         "…two traditions of the American small town…first tradition…is that the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     257         "The other tradition [of the American small town] is that [among] the significant features of all villages are…shrewd comic old men who are known as 'hicks' and who ejaculate 'Wall I swan.' " Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     257         " …unread sets of Mark Twain…." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Quotes: Small Town (4)


 Small town     153         "The 'village virus': …more dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking…the germ which…infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces… epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants—all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     155        "I decided to leave here, stern resolution, grasp the world…found that the Village Virus had me…didn’t want to face new streets and younger men—real competition." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     166         "You’re so damned superior, and think the city is such a hell of a lot finer place, and you want us to do what you want, all the time…." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     184         "Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer’s proofs of social progress." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     202         "…the jocose insults which are the wit of Main Street." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Quotes: Small Town (3)


 Small town     143         "How had she fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within?" Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     151         "Small-town philosophy: People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked.: Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     151        "Small-town philosophy: Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     151         "Small-town philosophy: There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.

Small town     153         "I wonder if the small town is not, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix…some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.