As The Saying Goes, You Might As Well Be Yourself; Everyone Else Is Taken.
Americans Are A Lot More Open, Of Course. There's Something More Declamatory In The Way You Express Emotions. It's A Stereotype But It's True. British People Can Appear Repressed In Expressing Emotions. Not Very Good At Self-evaluating, Or Affirming Situations, Touching, Anything Like That.
As I Said, If You Don't Stand Up For Yourself, People Aren't Going To Think That You Can Stand Up For Them.
When You Do A Good Turn You Feel Rich, Even If You Are Broke.
If A Dish Doesn't Turn Out Right, Change The Name And Don't Bat An Eyelid. A Fallen Souffle Is Only A Risen Omelette. It Depends On The Self-confidence With Which You Present It.
Life Is Too Short To Spend Your Time Avoiding Failure.
I Have Read All Of Daniel Aaron's Books, And Admired Them, But In The Americanist I Believe He Has Composed An Intellectual And Social Memoir For Which He Will Be Remembered. His Self-portrait Is Marked By Personal Tact And Admirable Restraint: He Is And Is Not Its Subject. The Americanist Is A Vision Of Otherness: Literary And Academic Friends And Acquaintances, Here And Abroad. Eloquently Phrased And Free Of Nostalgia, It Catches A Lost World That Yet Engendered Much Of Our Own.
It Is By Extending Oneself, By Exercising Some Capacity Previously Unused That You Come To A Better Knowledge Of Your Own Potential.
The True Use Of Shakespeare Or Of Cervantes, Of Homer Or Of Dante, Of Chaucer Or Of Rabelais, Is To Augment One's Own Growing Inner Self. . . . The Mind's Dialogue With Itself Is Not Primarily A Social Reality. All That The Western Canon Can Bring One Is The Proper Use Of One's Own Solitude, That Solitude Whose Final Form Is One's Confrontation With One's Own Mortality.
We Read Deeply For Varied Reasons, Most Of Them Familiar: That We Cannot Know Enough People Profoundly Enough; That We Need To Know Ourselves Better; That We Require Knowledge, Not Just Of Self And Others, But Of The Way Things Are. Yet The Strongest, Most Authentic Motive For Deep Reading…is The Search For A Difficult Pleasure.
Locke Had Illegitimately Selected Those Parts Of Man He Needed For His Social Contract And Suppressed All The Rest, A Theoretically Unsatisfactory Procedure And A Practically Costly One. The Bourgeois Is The Measure Of The Price Paid, He Who Most Of All Cannot Afford To Look To His Real Self, Who Denies The Existence Of The Thinly Boarded-over Basement In Him, Who Is Most Made Over For The Purposes Of A Society That Does Not Even Promise Him Perfection Or Salvation But Merely Buys Him Off.
Various Kinds Of Self-forgetting, Usually Accompanied By Illusions And Myths, Make It Possible To Live Without The Intransigent Facing Of Death-in The Sense Of Always Thinking About It And What It Means For Life And The Things Dear In Life-which Is Characteristic Of A Serious Life.
