People From Connecticut

"Strike—for your altars and your fires! Strike—for the green graves of your sires! God, and your native land!"

"Come to the bridal chamber, Death! Come to the mother’s, when she feels For the first time her first-born’s breath! Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke! Come in consumption’s ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm! Come when the heart beats high and warm, With banquet song, and dance, and wine! And thou art terrible!—the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier, And all we know or dream or fear Of agony are thine. But to the hero, when his sword Has won the battle for the free, Thy voice sounds like a prophet’s word; And in its hollow tones are heard The thanks of millions yet to be."

"Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt, The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt, The Douglas in red herrings."

"Youth is thy gift—the youth that baffles Time."

"This Life is a fleeting breath, And whither and how shall I go, When I wander away with Death By a path that I do not know?"

"I dwell no more in Arcady:— But when the sky is blue with May, And flowers spring up along the way, And birds are blithe, and winds are free, I know what message is for me,— Fotr I have been in Arcady."

"I hied me off to Arcady— The month it was the month of May, And all along the pleasant way The morning birds were mad with glee, And all the flowers sprang up to see, As I went on to Arcady."

"At end of Love, at end of Life, At end of Hope, at end of Strife, At end of all we cling to so— The sun is setting—must we go?At dawn of Love, at dawn of Life, At dawn of Peace that follows Strife, At dawn of all we long for so— The sun is rising—let us go."

"Bend low, O dusky Night, And give my spirit rest; Hold me to your deep breast, And put old cares to flight; Give back the lost delight That once my soul possest, When Love was loveliest,— Bend low, O dusky night!"

"There is rust upon locks and hinges, And mold and blight on the walls, And silence faints in the chambers, And darkness waits in the halls."

"But courage, and patience, and faith, and hope have their limit. Blessed be the man who escapes such trial as will determine limit! To a lone man it comes not near; for how can trial take hold where there is nothing by which to try? A funeral? You reason with philosophy. A grave yard? You read Hervey and muse upon the wall. A friend dies? You sigh, you pat your dog,—it is over. Losses? You retrench—you light your pipe—it is forgotten. Calumny? You laugh—you sleep. But with that childless wife clinging to you in love and sorrow—what then? Can you take down now, and coolly blow the dust from the leaf-tops? Can you crimp your lip with ? Can you smoke idly, your feet dangling with the ivies, your thoughts all waving fancies upon a church-yard wall—a wall that borders the grave of your boy? Can you amuse yourself by turning stinging into rhyme? Can you pat your dog, and seeing him wakeful and kind, say, "it is enough?" Can you sneer at calumny, and sit by your fire dozing?"

"The attempt to better one's condition is always praiseworthy; but it is only base and ignoble to attempt to cover one's condition with an idle smack of something larger."

"It is certain that by a special dispensation of Providence in favor of those who make up the bulk of the human family, a man may secure a simple livelihood in agricultural pursuits, with less of energy, less of promptitude, less of calculation, and greater unthrift generally, than would be compatible with even this scanty aim, in any other calling of life."

"I find no man so disagreeable to meet with, as one who knows everything. Of course we expect it in newspaper editors, and allow for it. But, to meet a man engaged in innocent occupations—over your fence, who is armed cap-a-pie against all new ideas,—who 'knew it afore,' or 'has heerd so,' or doubts it, or replies to your most truthful sally 't'ain't so, nuther,' is aggravating in the extreme."

"I have no faith in cats: they are a cold-blooded race; they are the politicians among domestic animals; they care little who is master, or what are the over-turnings, so their pickings are secure; and what are their midnight caucuses but primary meetings?"

"But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties; and it is a pretty promoter of intelligence, since it multiplies the avenues for its reception; and it is a good basis for a generous habit of life; it even equips beauty, neither hardening its hand with toil, nor tempting the wrinkles to come early."

"Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days, and months, and years, must be passed in the chase of that bubble—reputation; which once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch, into a hundred lesser bubbles, that soar above you still!"

"Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose—easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in slimy waters."

"The fact is that fifty percent of our national mind is a giant, explosive blowup of a Xerox of a 1970s rock-and-roll press list."

"Civilization without its appliances is weaker than barbarism."

"(How did you meet George Trow, the New Yorker editor?) JK: I met National Lampoon editor Michael O’Donoghue in an elevator. We started to talk, and he said, “I know someone who would like you very much!” And he introduced me to George, who adopted me as a sister. He thought I was funny, so he would take me to events with him, and I would say something, and he would write it down. And the things I said began to appear in “Talk of the Town”; George would say “we went somewhere with our sassy black friend Jamaica Kincaid” and the whole rest of it would be something I had said."

"Maybe that’s why everyone died young. Some of the questions you didn’t dare ask about Earth People’s Park were: Where is it? Who will run it? Will anyone want to do the real work? Like the global economy now, it was just something assumed, and the people in the room were there to embody the zeitgeist of it and kill the people who didn’t belong (or seem to belong) in the body of the zeitgeist."

"I don’t just like Ike; I love him. I think he’s the guy of guys, I think he’s uniquely American, and I’m sorry we’re not going to have him anymore."

"[O]ne loss in our era has been any interest in stories told from the top down."

"[Ike] was presiding over a situation in which history was turning into demography, in which judgment—and Ike possessed judgment with a capital J—was being drained out of every powerful situation, and marketing considerations were being pumped in."

"Our third American Tragedy is Martin Luther King. King was Mario Cuomo and Stevenson another way. Oh, he had some Roosevelt will to power, but Cuomo has a will to power, and Stevenson had a little, maybe more than I’m giving him credit for. He was who you wanted it to be, in a way. Old America. We’re singing spirituals again. We’re having dreams again. Well, that left mechanization entirely out of the question. There was no Hollywood there. There were no gangsters there. There was no World War II victory there. I hope everyone understands I’m being completely nonracist when I say he was Adlai Stevenson another way."

"With Eisenhower, we’re dealing with something after the fact, a kind of Diocletian grace of God to rule over us, for a time, while we figure out who we are, as rulers."

"As that little child in the spacesuit in The Seven year Itch grew up, three things would become obvious to him. He would be aware that he hadn’t been trained to really understand the history of mechanization, and was insufficient in that regard; that he hadn’t been trained to be anything like Winston Churchill, and was going to be permanently insufficient in that regard; and that he wasn’t actually going to be able to look a mine worker in the eye, and was going to be insufficient in that regard. He was going to be aware that he had been a Video Ranger from the start, and that he was going to have to keep on being a Video Ranger, and that he was going to have to learn to laugh about that. And, also, because he wanted to get married, to be a man in some sense, he was going to have to be serious about something. He was going to have to touch base with some real thing going on in his father, and what he got hold of was the irony in his father....And the evolution of that process is toward David Letterman…. We were going to have to grow up to be entirely ironic in our visceral reactions to our own manhood."

"Don’t let me get grand with you; I’m not someone who was, from day one, turning himself into a philosophical academic or anything; I was, from day one, someone who was determined to survive, and to pay attention to what was going on around him, period, and when Elvis Presley came along, my heart stood still, to borrow the Larry Hart lyric. The first note I heard from him, I said, “Well, this is it, this is a sufferer like me, this is something new, this is what I want, this is who I am, in a way,” and Elvis had that gift. That’s why there are so many Elvis imitators."

"…the film [Elvis ’56] is moving to me because it shows his vital uniqueness walking—a new kind of old American, innocent, with old American experience, and that’s always been our formula, our innocence, plus a unique kind of experience that other people haven’t had in other lands—walking with all of that, plus physical beauty, into Rear Window—down-the-drain-land."

"(discussing the Alfred Hitchcock film Saboteur): …I saw when I was young that, in fact, when you got to the top or toward the top of things, you found, indeed, very flawed but glamorous people, people who were, in fact, not thinking about the kinds of problems that the blind man was thinking about in 1943, not acting intuitively and bravely and in some kind of harmony with nature as that blind man in Saboteur was acting, and certainly not taking on impossible tasks. People were acting in a kind of what I’ve come to call a deutero-Hemingway way: they were preserving their own vitality by being adventurous within the media. The James Stewart character is someone who roams the world, but with a camera, not a gun, and not like Schweitzer, setting up modes of change in impossible places. He’s touring the world adventurously in the interest of preserving his masculine independence, but he’s doing it with a camera."

"By 1956, out of all the Cultural Avatars and Vectors available in 1950, THE GIRL had won. Authority. (And they had it, those girls; no one today has it.) They’d won the war, in a way."

"USA Today is back-formed from the Assumed Dominant Mind of television."

"...my friend Dr. Arno Gruen, author of The Insanity of Normality, has said an interesting thing. He said that culture, in recent decades, has taken on a life of its own, without reference to the people it is supposed to protect."

"Your parents had a third parent—television. If you went back to 1950, you would be surprised. Many people—of all kinds and conditions—had just two parents. In the time since then, the referee has won all the championship matches—and the referee is a value-free ritual."

"World War II changed the demography. For a while, high seriousness was a part (only a part) of the mix. No one likes to think that the vector that has carried him into the demography could get lost in the demography, but that is what happens. Rock and roll—or the generating spirit of rock and roll—could get lost there, easily. And just think of all the ideas—and changes—there were implicit in the hegemony of rock and roll. We could be left with . . . just some of the music."

"The 1960s weren’t the 1920s again; they were the Liberal Arts expressed in the negative. The 1970s, despite the hedonism, weren’t the 1920s; they were the Negative out to get all the rewards formerly held by the Positive. The Goat and Adding Machine Ritual is now."

"Each one of these social generations—from the ‘50s, from the ‘60s, from the ‘70s, from the Reagan era, from now—thinks of its social aesthetic as definitive. In fact, they are all in a process: encouraged toward, and beyond, hubris, by demography."

"The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing."

"Soon it will be achieved. The lie of television has been that there are contexts to which television will grant an access. Since lies last, usually, no more than one generation, television will re-form around the idea that television itself is a context to which television will grant an access."

"The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it."

"Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million. For them, there is no distance between the two grids of American life. Of all Americans, only they are complete."

"Wonder was the grace of the country."

"What do you think would be my fate if my misguided countrymen were to take me prisoner?"

"Let me die in this old uniform in which I fought my battles. May God forgive me for ever having put on another."

"Compounding the agony was the treason of Benedict Arnold, who conspired to sell the plans of West Point- the crucial fortress in Washington's Hudson Highlands defense system- to the British. While some believed the conspiracy's failure afforded, as Greene said, "the most convincing proofs that the liberties of America are the object of divine protection," others wondered whether the cause would survive. If Arnold, who served so nobly at Quebec, at Valcour Island, and during the Saratoga campaign, had lost all sense of honor and patriotism, how many others might follow his treasonous path?"

"Neglected by Congress below; pinched with every want here; distressed with the small-pox; want of Generals and discipline in our Army — which may rather be called a great rabble — our late unhappy retreat from Quebec, and loss of the Cedars; our credit and reputation lost, and great part of the country; and a powerful foreign enemy advancing upon us; are so many difficulties we cannot surmount them. My whole thoughts are now bent on making a safe retreat out of this country; however, I hope we shall not be obliged to leave it until we have had one bout more for the honour of America. I think we can make a stand at Isle-aux-Noix, and keep the Lake this summer from an invasion that way. We have little to fear; but I am heartily chagrined to think we have lost in one month all the immortal Montgomery was a whole campaign in gaining, together with our credit, and many men and an amazing sum of money. The commissioners this day leave us, as our good fortune has long since; but as Miss, like most other Misses, is fickle, and often changes, I still hope for her favors again; and that we shall have the pleasure of dying or living happy together."

"We have but very indifferent men in general. Great part of those who ship for seamen know very little of the matter."

"The drafts from the regiments at Ticonderoga are a miserable set; indeed the men on board the fleet, in general, are not equal to half their number of good men."

"We have a wretched motley crew, in the fleet; the marines the refuse of every regiment, and the seamen, few of them, ever wet with salt water."