Quotes on Mimicry

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.