Quotes
Quotes about Age
I believe Nabokov was right in saying that language itself is one of the characters of fiction
On Flaubert's 3 Contes: They are not quite short stories as we know them, then, yet to any modern writer, in whatever language, these are recommended as a fundamental textbook of style
Humanity is unregenerable and hates the language of conformity, since conformity has a whiff of the inhuman about it
Self, selves - why not have "selve" as a verb? If a thing "selves" it speaks itself, says what it is. A bell selves, so does a snowstorm. When a thing selves it shows its "sakes", its individual marks: a bird's plumage, a bell's harmonics
The English language has allowed itself to be shackled into a verse system borrowed from the Latin languages, which don't go in for the hammerblows of the natural Saxon
We live in an age of dilution
Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much
Joyce might as well, in his last great dense book, have left us twenty pages of possible titles (perhaps he did; I must look again).
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
The novelist siphons his inner life into the work he has already published; his outer life may be summed up in the image of a man at a desk
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going
Anthony Burgess A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults. The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
I washed off the day and middleage
Courage! Though life is feeble, life persists
There are times ... when drunkeness attacks the universe of the spirit. The balance of good and evil is very noticably distrubed, and while some fear the end of all things, others rejoice in the belief that a new age is coming
Coldly for a moment he saw that if there was to be love it must be love with advantage
And then I see myself as ageing, bald, rheumy, three teeth but newly drawn, a man who should think it foul shame to drivel and froth so in youth's lust
There are plays to be written, images of order and beauty to be coaxed out of wrack, filth, sin, chaos
... the great rage which justifies murder and the firing of cities and makes a man rise into his whimpering strong citadel of self-pitying aloneness
There is no virtue of itself in age
I am old enough to know that the only self-evident duty is to that image of order we all carry in our brains. That the keeping of chaos under with stern occasional kicks or permanent tough floorboards is man's duty, and that all the rest is solemn hypocrite's words to justify self-interest.
For the first time it was made clear to me that language was no vehicle of soothing prettiness to warm cold castles that waited for spring ... but a potency of sharp knives and brutal hammers
I will haunt your grey age, enemy!
What in God's name is the difference between a language and a dialect? I'll tell you. A language waves flags and is blown up by politicians. A dialect keeps to things, things, things, street smells and street noises, life
Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things of the outer world to which it adhered
