Edgar Pangborn

Quotes

1. “Propaganda is bad art.”

   “Aren’t you thinking in terms of music, though?”

   “No. In music the problem just doesn’t exist. You don’t even start looking for propaganda in music unless your head’s already addled.”

   “Yes, but in art—well, Daumier, Goya, Hogarth—”

   “They live,” said Sharon, “because they were good artists. If their social ideas had been the kind we don’t happen to like in the twentieth century, their work would last just the same. Cellini was a louse. The piety of Blake and El Greco almost doesn’t exist nowadays. Their work does.”

   p. 176

2. 

   She likes to talk, but her mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers which I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she has no more to say she doesn’t go on talking.

   p. 63

3. 

   “I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.”

   “If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.”

   p. 176

4. 

   What hurts us worst is to have our favorite self-deceptions stripped away.

   p. 169

5. 

   I see them as they are. There’s no truth in them. They project the wishes of a little greedy ape against the blank of eternity, and call it truth—there’s triviality if you like. They invent a larger ape somewhat beyond the clouds,—or somewhat beyond the Galaxy, which is the same thing—and call it God; they use this invention as an authority, to justify every vice of cruelty or greed or vanity or lust that their small minds can imagine. They talk of justice, and say that their laws derive from a sense of justice (which they have never defined); but no human law ever derived from anything except fear—fear of the unknown, the different, the difficult, fear of man’s own self. They make war, not for any of the noisy noble reasons they produce, but simply because they hate themselves almost as much as they hate their neighbors. They gibber of love, love, but human love is merely one more projection of the ape-self, superimposed on the invented image of another person.

   p. 200

6. 

   “Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.”

   p. 123

7. 

   One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.

   p. 30

8. 

   They measure rank as Mussolini did, by the amount of carpet between door and desk.

   p. 133

9. 

   Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truths. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim.

   p. 69

10. 

    Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?

    p. 149

11. 

    Patience is a narcotic for the weak.

    p. 14

12. 

    I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them.

    p. 79