Saturday, May 21, 2011

"He moves through the world leaving people more alive to the things he loves."

Edmund de Waal, of Proust's Swann and by implication his own fourth cousin Charles Ephrussi, in The hare with the amber eyes: a family's century of art and loss (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 106.

"you cause sufferings upon sufferings, in a miserable, lamentable welter of catastrophe."

The Chorus in Euripides' Helen, ll. 1163-1164, trans. James Morwood (Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen, trans. & ed. James Morwood, Oxford world's classics (Oxford & New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 152).   The Greek is more concrete:

ἐπὶ δὲ πάθεα πάθεσι φέρεις
ἀθλίοις ἐν σψμφοραῖς ᾿Ιλίοις.

Euripides on the point of punctuation

What is god, or is not god, or what is in between?
Which of mortals can say after searching?
He who can see the divine
leaping this way and that and back again
in contradictory unexpected shifts of fortune,
he it is who has got furthest towards an answer. . . .
. . . I can find no certainty among men,
no true report, about the gods above.

The Chorus in Euripides' Helen, ll. 1137-1150, trans. James Morwood (Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen, trans. & ed. James Morwood, Oxford world's classics (Oxford & New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 152).

Carey on the pursuit of prosperity

"It is strange, in New York and Philadelphia, to see the feverish enthusiasm which accompanies Americans' pursuit of prosperity and the way they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route to achieve it."

Olivier, in Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 237.