Quotes

Revision as of 20:11, 29 December 2008

Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita: P 50

The regulars danced and so did their guests, Muscovites and out-of-towners too, the writer Ioann from the Kronstadt, someone called Vitya Kuftik from Rostov, who was apparently a director and had a purple birthmark covering his entire cheek; representatives of the poetry subsection of MASSOLIT, that is, Pavianov, Bogokhulsky, Sladky, Spichkin, and Adelfina Buzdyak; young men of dubious profession wearing jackets with shoulder pads; and a very elderly man with a piece of green onion stuck in his beard, who danced with an anemic girl in a crumpled orange dress.

Of Whitman (from James 1903) [1]

Until I knew the man," continues Dr.

Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or against any trades or occupations--not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it."[38]

also from James's Varieties of Religious Experience:

In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow

in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order.

Everything before the comma is just context, I liked his language after the comma

Skinner citing Rochefoucauld: "No man deserves to be praised for his goodness unless he has the strength of character to be wicked. All other goodness is generally nothing but indolence or impotence of will."

I grabbed this from Google Books, but I won't link it because, as my dad found, pages on Google Books tend to disappear when you link to them.