The Writings of Transcendence...
Homer J. Simpson
"If something's hard to do it's not worth doing."

John Milton
"The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n."
Paradise Lost, Book One (254-255)

Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I care for nothing but the truth; and shall always much more readily accept a harsh truth,
in regard to my writings, than a sugared falsehood.”
(Letter to Edgar Allen Poe, June 17, 1846)

“P.S. A small troglodyte made his appearance here at ten minutes to six o’clock, this
morning, who claims to be your nephew, and the heir to all our wealth and honours.”
(Letter to Louisa Hawthorne, June 22, 1846)

F. Scott Fitzgerald
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.”

(The Great Gatsby, 1926)

“All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the
punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly.”
(Letter to Frances Scott Fitzgerald, August 8, 1933)

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy - one of those uneventful
times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to
have been the pleasure itself.”

“See that little stream - we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to
walk to it - a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward
behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the
dead like a million bloody rugs. No European will ever do that again in this generation.”

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing…Maybe because the condition of
emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

“Finally he was gone, with all the shadowy unimportance about the offensive bulk of the
third party.”
(Tender is the Night, 1934)

A young lawyer in Maine, 1800s
“In affairs of love, young people’s hearts are generally much wiser than old peoples heads.”

Benjamin Franklin
“ a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated;
and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in
countenance.”

“Nothing so likely to make a man’s fortune as virtue.”

“I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or
expression in the language that imported a fix’d opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly,
etc. and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or
so; or it so appears to me at present.”

(on religious sects claiming to be “in possession of all truths”)
“like a man travelling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he
sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on
each side, but near him all appears clear, tho’ in truth he is as much in the fog as any of
them.”

“as we enjoy the great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an
opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and
generously.”
(The Autobiography)

“Thorough honesty requires great and long proof, since many a man, long thought honest,
has at length proved a knave.”
(Silence Dogood No. 9, July 23, 1722)

“Every man sets himself above another in his own opinion, and there are not two men in
the world whose sentiments are alike in everything.”
(On Titles of Honour, February 18, 1723)

“There is no burden so grievous to man as time that he knows not how to dispose of.”
(Journal of a Voyage, August 25th, 1726)

“remember that modesty, as it makes the most homely virgin amiable and charming, so the
want of it infallibly renders the most perfect beauty disagreeable and odious. But when that
brightest of female virtues shines among other perfections of body and mind in the same
person, it makes the woman more lovely than an angel.”
(Letter to Jane Franklin, January 6, 1726-7)

Abner Doubleday
“Thousands of men - the flower of our Northern youth - have gone down to their graves
unheralded and unknown, and their achievements and devotion to the cause have already
been forgotten.”
(New York, January, 1882)

Adèle Geras
“If you expect terrible things, then they don’t surprise you, and all good things are like
wonderful gifts.”
(Troy)

Azar Nafisi
“I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams.”
(Reading Lolita In Tehran)


Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
- On Oppenheimer at Harvard:
“His diet often consisted of little more than chocolate, beer and artichokes.”
American Prometheus, p.30.

Seneca
“An act is not revenged unless it is surpassed.”

Herbert Smith
- about Oppenheimer
“The trouble is, you’ve got to have a psychiatrist who is abler than the person who’s being
analysed. They don’t have anybody.”
American Prometheus, p.49.

Richard Feynman
“[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.
And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.”
American Prometheus, p.79.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek.”
- Aged nine, quoted in Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p.28.

“I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms
and sunsets caparison the sky;”
- about New Mexico in 1922, American Prometheus, p.28.

A toast:
“To the confusion of our enemies.”
American Prometheus, p.121.

“The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.”
- at Princeton, 1950s, American Prometheus, p.387.

“Above all I have the knowledge that it is in America largely that it will be decided what
manner of world we are to live in.”
- letter to Frank Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, p.391.

Amy Tan
“Sometimes only the subversiveness of comedy can do justice to the extremes of horror.”
- quoted in Time, January 9, 2006
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