
“Why is the measure of love… loss? pg.9”
Written on the Body (1992)
Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
“Why is the measure of love… loss? pg.9”
Written on the Body (1992)
Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 139
Source: "Faulkner and Desegregation" in Partisan Review (Fall 1956); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Context: Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
“But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.”
“I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.”
Tales of a Traveler http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13514, To the Reader http://books.google.com/books?id=6R0GAAAAQAAJ&q=%22I+am+always+at+a+loss+to+know+how+much+to+believe+of+my+own+stories%22&pg=PR13#v=onepage (1824).
Dorothy Parker, "Re-enter Margot Asquith - A Masterpiece from the French," The New Yorker, October 22, 1927.
General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory