“I gave up the love of learning for the love of oblivion—the two cannot live together.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 9, “Pages in an Old Book” (p. 296).
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Tad Williams 79
novelist 1957Related quotes
“Love can really screw you up before you learn to live with it.”
Source: Bride Quartet Boxed Set
Letter to Emily Holmes Coleman (2 February 1934) http://www.case.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/brandelmcdaniel/index/library.htm
“I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning.”
Source: Education of a Wandering Man (1989), Ch. 1
Context: My own education, which is the one I know most about, has been haphazard, a hit-and-miss affair that was and continues to be thoroughly delightful.
I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.
“So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.”
Speech, London (10 March 1880).
Context: Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?
So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first — and all this for trifles that no man really needs!
On young couples who have not yet matured enough to recognize and respect each other's solitude
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Source: Life of Pi (2001), Chapter 1, p. 6
Context: The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity — it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.