A Quote by Benjamin Franklin
On the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been had I not attempted it.
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Far better for a man that he had never been born than that he should degrade a pulpit into a show box to exhibit himself in.
He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.
although she went home that night feeling happier than she had ever been in her short life, she did not confuse the golf course party with a good party, and she did not tell herself she had a pleasant time. it had been, she felt, a dumb event preceded by excellent invitations. what frankie did that was unusual was to imagine herself in control. the drinks, the clothes, the instructions, the food (there had been none), the location, everything. she asked herself: if i were in charge, how could i have done it better?
And they did have fun, though it was of different kind now. All that yearning and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.
I have more compassion than if I had led a life where everything worked out exactly as I had planned or if I had never been wounded or if I had never been betrayed or I had never been harmed. I don't think I would be as good a person.
Porgy is...an interesting example of what can be done by talent in spite of a bad setup. With a libretto that should never have been accepted on a subject that should never have been chosen, a man who should never have attempted it has written a work that has a considerable power.
There's never been a game plan, and I suppose I've had an uneasy relationship with my ambition. Someone who had been in my year at drama school once said to me that I was terrifyingly ambitious back then. Which was not at all what I felt at the time - I felt paralysed with shyness, though that evaporated.
Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
A libretto that should never have been accepted on a subject that should never have been chosen bya man who should never have attempted it.
It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.
How happy had it been for me had I been slain in the battle. It had been far more noble to have died the victim of the enemy than fall a sacrifice to the rage of my friends.
A young man had become possessed by a devil. The thing within him burst into loud lamentation and departed from the man. At once the youth's eye fell out on his cheek, and the whole of the pupil which had been black became white.
If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.
He should have known better because, early in his learnings under his brother Mahmoud, he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictable changing their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok. Short human words were never like a short Martian word - such as grok which forever meant exactly the same thing. Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife. And this had been a very short word.
Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Once, this had been the life I’d wanted. Even chosen. Now, though, I couldn’t believe that there had been a time when this kind of monotony and silence, this most narrow of existences, had been preferable. Then again, once, I’d never known anything else.
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