What you are talking about is brutal desire-just-Desire!-the name
of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter,
up one old narrow street and down another...

- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

‘When the facts change I change my mind. And what do you do, sir?’

-John Maynard Keynes, to an unnamed dogmatist.



“ A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country…he can only have one country…and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life…I did not leave Russia of my own will, even though I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally. Yet the right to criticize Russia is mine and because I love it, and I do not give any foreigner the right.”

~The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, on his return to Russia after fifty years in exile

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Found in
The Last Liberal and Other Essays, Ramachandra Guha

“Mourning is hard business,” Cesare said.” If people knew, there’d be less death.”

- Bernard Malamud’s “Life Is Better Than Death”

“I’m good and tired of all these big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists.”

- Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March

“Let us say before I go any further, that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generation to come.”

- Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies