“Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.”
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Henry David Thoreau 385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes
“As fish cannot live without water, so guerrillas cannot live without the people.”
With the century, vol. 5
“Men lived like fishes; the great ones devoured the small.”
:3 Fish: Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
:1 Fish. Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.
:*William Shakespeare, Pericles, Act ii. Sc. 1.
Source: Discourses Concerning Government (1689), Ch. 2, Sect. 18; comparable to:
“In Heraclitus' river
a fish has imagined the fish of all fish”
"In Heraclitus' River"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)
Context: In Heraclitus' river
a fish has imagined the fish of all fish,
a fish kneels to the fish, a fish sings to the fish,
a fish begs the fish to ease its fishy lot.
“We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.”
Acceptance speech http://www.bookcritics.org/?go=leonardAcceptanceSpeech, National Book Critics Circle 2006 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (8 March 2007)
Context: My whole life I have been waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. From these writers, for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace. At an average of five books a week, not counting all those sighed at and nibbled on before they go to the Strand, I will read 13,000. Then I'm dead. Thirteen thousand in a lifetime, about as many as there are new ones published every month in this country.
It's not enough, and yet rich to excess. The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them — not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agit-prop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff info-tainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.
Pt. 1, Ch. 2 - p.31
Giovanni's Room (1956)
“One fish Two fish Red fish Blue fish!”
“Live the Dream, Dream the Fish”
written on reverse of Dreamfish CD, 1993.