Quoting her mother's statement after her son's birth, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
“I think you're right about the difference between the Trojan mind and the Greek mind: the Greeks live in their imaginations while the Trojans always try to see things as they really are. And with some things they do get hold of the truth, and with some things they don't. But, where they don't, they won't have substitutes. That's why their world-outlook is so much smaller than ours. It's concentrated in a few certainties which are far ahead of anything we'll arrive at, but when you have these you feel that the rest is a blank and long to be back in the bigger world again, where there's space and variety and perplexity.”
Helen in A Trojan Ending (London: Constable, 1937)
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Laura Riding Jackson 42
poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer 1901–1991Related quotes
I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 239, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=48m10s
"We Are The Few" from "Everything Goes Numb" (2003) http://risc.perix.co.uk/lyrics/sm/egn/06/
“Do not trust the horse, Trojans.
Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts.”
Equo ne credite, Teucri.
quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book II, Lines 48–49; Trojan priest of Apollo warning against the wooden horse left by the Greeks.
“I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”
Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.
Letter to Jacob Batt (12 April 1500); Collected Works of Erasmus Vol 1 (1974)
Variant translation: When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
“Some things you don't have to tell. Some things, between sisters, are understood.”
Source: That Summer
A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text
On how he would like to be remembered (1994)
Context: Oh, I don't know — that's a hell of a question — I don't tend to look at my stuff that way. I just look at it a book at a time. Something like the Amber books are in a different class. I try not to anticipate. I don't know what I'll be writing a few years from now. I have some ideas — I have lots of different things I want to try. I almost don't really care what history thinks. I like the way I'm being treated right now.