Trefethen Quotes & Sayings

The whole human race loses by every act of personal vengeance. — Rae Foley

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams. — Kate Bernheimer

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news. — Marshall McLuhan

I've never considered musical equipment very sacred. — Kurt Cobain

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony. — Edward Abbey

As I see it, the thing that hurt my putting most when it was bad, was thinking too much about how I was making the stroke and not enough about getting the ball in the hole. — Bobby Jones

The Moon was the most spectacularly beautiful desert you could ever imagine. Unspoilt. Untouched. It had a vibrancy about it and the contrast between it and the black sky was so vivid, it just made this impression of excitement and wonder. — Charles Duke

We're willing to move pretty far on this issue, we're much more tolerant than we used to be, but don't mix it up with religion and God. — Alan Wolfe

The picaresque path can probably also be a metaphor for the passage of the soul back to its creator. The thieves along the way
the thieves of money, of love, of magic, of time
are merely human obstacles to keep the traveller from perceiving that she herself is the path.
The path is as steep and as precipitous as we make it, as level and rolling as we can grade it, as steady as we are steady, as passable or impassable as our own will to pass.
In a true picaresque, the hero stops struggling and becomes the path.
At fifty, we need this knowledge most of all. — Erica Jong

[Talking about Rosalind in As You Like It] She disguises herself as a boy, drops all the covering inhibitions of "femininity", and really searches for her true self (...) Her disguise gives her the ability to find out about herself, what she really thinks and feels (...). And she can do all this freely, without having anyone in power tell her how women should or should not behave.(...) — Tina Packer

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. — Errol Morris

The cruising life isn't for all of us. It isn't even for most
of us, but it is for some of us, and for a few of us it is essential to survival. — Jim Trefethen

There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth's passions, earth's griefs, earth's incongruous, ridiculous humours - dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face. — Mervyn Peake

The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it. — Lord Chesterfield