"Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes"

[fiefoe]

Did book designers go on strike around the year 1980? The ones that did stay on the job got away with merely slapping the name of the author and the title in some big rounded font onto the cover and call it a day. I first noticed this display of boldness (doh) with the Chandler omnibus, now this, and that.

For a book critic, it's certainly a good thing to be able to quote well.

• [Jack Wiener on dancing:] Think of yourself as a rich man, indulging his every whim.
• what someone comprehensively called the innate contrariness of matter
• Freud felt that our personalities develop in response to risk.
• Only trial and error can compose what Wordsworth called "the deeper music of humanity."
• 'Trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,' as Shakespeare put it, bootless being synonymous with feckless. Bootleg makes no bones about its illicit nature...
• St. Augustine said of God, 'Do not presume to call him ineffable, for that is to say too much about him.'
• Thoreau said, 'A poet is someone who, having nothing to do, finds something to do.'
• "He is a little young for 'silence, exile and cunning.'"
• When Francis Bacon said that "there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportions"...
• Even Freud, who was a pessimist, conceded that the neurotic thinks big.
• The day writhes with revelations, as a poet said.
• [Henry James:] The artist was the man on whom nothing was lost.
• Kierkegaard defines anxiety as the dizziness of freedom.
• [Ernest Becker:] It's the suction of the infinite that pulls us out of shape.
• [Arthur Machen:] A gentleman never looks out of the window.
• 'We have done something to accelerate the exhaustion of the possibilities.' {??}
  
• 'I see the boys of summer in their ruin.'
• 'The difficulty is not how to understand beauty, but how to be able to stand it.' [Hanns Sacks]
  
• Kenneth Clark says that Rubens was the first man to paint 'the accident of flesh'.
• To paraphrase Paul Valery: a syllogism not yet debased by agony.
• [Meyer Schapiro:] Almost every decision in middle-class life is an aesthetic one: how to behave, what to wear... what shape to give to your time.
• [Nietzsche:] Jokes are often the epitaphs of emotions.
  

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More quotes:
James Joyce on Buddhism: Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.

Robert Burton on his own "Anatomy of Melancholy": ... a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgement, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, phantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all...

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