A Quote by Alexander Woollcott

Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water. — © Alexander Woollcott
Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water.
Where does rain come from? It comes from all the dirty water that evaporates from the earth, like urine and the water you throw out after washing your feet. Isn't it wonderful how the sky can take that dirty water and change it into pure, clean water? Your mind can do the same with your defilements if you let it.
I'm not someone else's mouthpiece. I'm not carrying water for anyone - whether that's the GOP, Fox News, or Christianity. I'm not doing anyone else's dirty work.
James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.
Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.
Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.
What's most troubling is the open water swim. It's windy, the waves are getting in your face and the water is a bit dirty. And there's silly things like you can't touch the bottom if you swallow a mouthful of water.
The Water said to the dirty one, “Come here.” The dirty one said, “I am too ashamed.” The water replied, “How will your shame be washed away without me?
Knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience.
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
Whenever someone asks me if I want water with my Scotch, I say I'm thirsty, not dirty.
Whenever someone asks me if I want water with my scotch, I say, I'm thirsty, not dirty.
I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.
Because reading is a way of putting yourself in someone else's experience, especially reading fiction.
It's been very jarring for me to stand in public and read about myself and my daughter and her father. I feel like I'm reading someone else's story, and I feel like I've lost something, too, in the writing of self, as if I'm standing and reading myself, as a stranger, to other strangers.
The president has said Republicans want dirty air and dirty water.
If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.
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