
“We are all just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always meant to do, with no actual volition.”
Source: Running With Scissors
“We are all just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always meant to do, with no actual volition.”
Source: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
“We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.”
Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Closing words from his last speech, Vanderbilt University (April 1989).
Context: In the nineteen-sixties, apartheid was driven out of America. Legal segregation — Jim Crow — ended. We didn't end racism, but we ended legal segregation. We ended the idea that you can send a million soldiers ten thousand miles away to fight in a war that people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. Now, it doesn't matter who sits in the Oval Office. But the big battles that were won in that period of civil war and strife you cannot reverse. We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong … and we were right! I regret nothing!
It is July 1959 and Hemingway is in Marceliano's bar in Pamplona, where he has not been since before the Spanish Civil War. In the following paragraph Hemingway mentions for contrast an unpleasant American journalist in his early twenties whose 'handsome young face already showed the traced lines of bitterness around the upper lips.'
Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 9
Launch.com, November 2, 2000<!-- site no longer exists -->
“Your eyes were filled with love, Kate Vane;
Ah, would that we were young again!”
Kate Vane, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).