Book II, Ch. 12
Essais (1595), Book II
“No man expects such exact fidelity as a traitor.”
fidei acerrimus exactor est perfidus
De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 28, line 7.
Moral Essays
“As far as I'm concerned the last good man went when Elvis died.”
Source: Bet Me
England, p. 74
Vokes - My Story (1985)
Context: I looked for certain attributes in a soldier. I know the modern method is to put the attributes into a computer and see what comes out. But as far as I am concerned, the computer is the worst damn instrument devised by man to screw up man-management.
Beautiful Losers (1966)
Context: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
“No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.”
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Introduction, p. xviii
"Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)
In an interview with Patricia Rickels, as quoted in John Lowe (1995) Conversations with Ernest Gaines, University Press of Mississippi, p. 131
Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/911713887061409797 (23 September 2017)
2017
"Literary Portraits. VIII - Mr. Joseph Conrad," in The Tribune (1907-09-14)
