William Saroyan citations

Page 6

“I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever.”

“Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.”

“All things lie dark in possibility.”

“What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.”

“The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.”

“I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.”

“The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.”

“Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.”

“The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.”

“I began to visit Armenia as soon as I had earned the necessary money.”

“The world was my home and I was glad to be in it.”

“I have read Schopenhauer at the age of twelve with no bewilderment and no contempt of his contempt for the world and its strange inhabitants, and no contempt for the strange inhabitant himself.”

“There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?”

“Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow.”

“This was such bad writing that it was good.”

“I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it.”

“I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it.”

“He knew the truth and was looking for something better.”

“Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.”

“Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing… Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits.”

“Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.”

“Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation.”

“Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.”

“The business of polishing my shoes satisfies my soul.”

“The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today.”

“Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.”

“The boy on the Oakland porch goes to sleep upon the universe of ice and wakes up and remembers the death of his father and mother, and sees the sun.”

“The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real.”

“The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn.”