Part 62 (2/2)
Riddle:
Who is the starved traveler who chooses the longest road, carries the weightiest baggage, and hardly ever arrives? And should he arrive, he at once loses not only his whole equipage but his very name.
Answer:
Hope.
Fear of hostility is less useful than hostility to fear.
Ideals die not because they fail of their attainment but because they have succeeded. To defeat a cause, work for it.
The unhappy person resents only his own unhappiness, not another person's. Unhappiness is the inability to generalize.
Boredom is the consequence of believing in the uniqueness of one's own experience. It vanishes the moment one acquires History.
The books we care for most are the ones which read us.
a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books.
b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments.
c. Poets: people who raze monuments.
d. Publishers: people who sell rubble.
e. Readers: people who buy it.
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Lonesomeness is hatred of truth.
If one does not reduce one's trouble to its proper proportion on one's own, life will do it soon enough-only more brutally.
Offer the resourceful man one of two legacies: a mammoth trust fund by inheritance of wealth, or a minuscule fund of trust by inheritance of nature; and he will choose the one which least inhibits venturesomeness.
Friends.h.i.+ps produce confidences; but confidences do not often produce friends.h.i.+ps.
A person who mourns for himself while his parents are alive is” a sinner.
Death persecutes before it executes.
Detail mocks Theme; Theme wors.h.i.+ps Detail. That is why the possible and the feasible are always at war.
23.
Here I stopped; an apparition of Enoch blotted the doorway.
”I've been waiting hours. Believe me I've just about run out of patience,” my mother said. ”What kept you? Don't tell me reporters or I'll know it was dancing girls. Was.h.i.+ngton's just the town for dissipation. What was it, you found a salami market? A peanut store?”
”Of the three cardinal pations,” my stepfather said (he set down his suitcase), ”choose one as follows: A, dissi-, hereinabove referred to; B, consti-, the mind's enemy; C, extir-, the world's delight. So you can never run out of pations even if you try.” He spotted me swimming in aphorisms. ”Where'd she get those?”
”I gave them to her,” my mother said.
”Old saws have no teeth.”
”Plenty of big jokes in your pockets. Something to celebrate. Comes in playing parlor games. Lost your life, and first thing home it's ha ha.”
”Ha ha I have not lost my life.”
”All right, call it anything you want, call it self-respect. Self-respect you've lost.”
”I continue to think highly of myself,” he demurred.
”Time,” she said. ”Don't say you haven't lost time! In a career time is everything. How long before they start taking you seriously again, that's what I want to know. You've lost time, you've lost a job, you've lost your footing on the high rungs, you've lost everything.”
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