Theodore Dreiser Quotes
American - Novelist August 27, 1871 - December 28, 1945

In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.
Theodore Dreiser

Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
Theodore Dreiser

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser

I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.
Theodore Dreiser

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Theodore Dreiser

Nothing is proved, all is permitted.
Theodore Dreiser

Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.
Theodore Dreiser

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
Theodore Dreiser


Man Ray Quotes
American - Photographer August 27, 1890 - November 18, 1976

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.
Man Ray

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.
Man Ray

All critics should be assassinated.
Man Ray

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
Man Ray

A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him.
Man Ray

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.
Man Ray

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.
Man Ray

One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.
Man Ray

Don't put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.
Man Ray

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.
Man Ray


Nancy Friday Quotes
American - Author Born: August 27, 1933

I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together, and manners hold a family together; in a way, they hold the world together.
Nancy Friday

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.
Nancy Friday

If women really want equality, we have to wipe the slate clean. It no longer matters in the largest sense what men did to us for the last 200 or 300 years.
Nancy Friday

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.
Nancy Friday

I'm sure it's why I'm such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I've always been equally fair to men.
Nancy Friday

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.
Nancy Friday

Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.
Nancy Friday

When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.
Nancy Friday

To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.
Nancy Friday

The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself.
Nancy Friday

I like the company of men. I've never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that.
Nancy Friday

Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
Nancy Friday

Dreams are the expression of the unconscious while we are asleep.
Nancy Friday

Fantasy isn't something you run out of.
Nancy Friday

I think biologically we are attracted to more than one person, but given society and our needs, monogamy works better.
Nancy Friday


William Least Heat-Moon Quotes
American - Writer Born: August 27, 1939

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat-Moon

Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.
William Least Heat-Moon

I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal.
William Least Heat-Moon

I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.
William Least Heat-Moon

Having made the trip from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean myself going up up up against twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri River, I can testify that it's one of the most arduous trips that anyone can make on this continent and yet I had a power boat to do it in.
William Least Heat-Moon

I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.
William Least Heat-Moon

Beware thoughts that come in the night.
William Least Heat-Moon

When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat-Moon

The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.
William Least Heat-Moon

I have not been on any river that has more of a distinctive personality than does the Missouri River. It's a river that immediately presents to the traveler, 'I am a grandfather spirit. I have a source; I have a life.'
William Least Heat-Moon

The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.
William Least Heat-Moon

Franchises and chains have come to dominate small communities, but those same chains have eliminated a lot of the greasy spoons, places you didn't want to eat in the first place.
William Least Heat-Moon

I simply couldn't make it without a copilot.
William Least Heat-Moon

It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he.
William Least Heat-Moon

I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.
William Least Heat-Moon